Testimony Of Two Men (110 page)

“Yes! Harald, too. He is also my son.”

He looked about the room, and his eye lit on something. “You can protect him no longer. I am going to find him and I am going to kill him.” He walked across the room to one of his bags and he picked up his riding crop, which he had thrown there the last time he had used it. Marjorie saw, and she cried out, and when he was near her again, she grasped his arm and looked up into his face, that appalling stranger’s face.

“Jon! You must be out of your mind!”

“I think I am,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter, does it? You can thank yourself for that, Mama.”

He flung her off and she fell heavily to her knees. She put up her hands to him like one pleading for her life. “Jon, think of Jenny!”

“I am the only one who has been thinking of Jenny. Not you, not Harald. Just myself.”

“Oh, Jon, you believed all those lies about her, you believed them all, and now you can talk about ‘thinking’ of her!”

He paused and looked down into her suddenly flooded eyes. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Mama. Who began those lies about Jenny? I made a few inquiries since you were away. I traced at least two back to Harald. Ah, I see that you knew that, too.”

Marjorie put her hands over her face as she knelt.

“And you let that go on, about Jenny and about me, and

you kept your serene silence and never said a word in defense of anybody!”

He made to step about her and she reached up and grasped the crop in his hand with both of hers. “Jon, you have a life to live, a future before you, you and Jenny, here or anywhere else. But one reckless thing— Jon, in the name of God, try to be reasonable, try to think!”

He laughed again and wrenched the crop from her hands. “I’ve been thinking, Mama. I’ve been thinking of thousands of things.”

She tried, in her extremity, to grasp his ankle, his leg, but he was quicker than she, and then she saw his face, black and murderous in the flickering lightning, and she quietly lay down on the floor and closed her eyes.

Jonathan ran down the stairs in the thunderous dusk, and flung open the door and was immediately outside, buffeted by the gale, almost blinded by the lightning. But no rain was falling. He ran through the dark and deserted streets, splashing through deep puddles, sending spray all about him. No lamps were lit. The city lay cowering under the exploding illumination of the storm, and Jonathan was all alone, racing like a madman through the streets, bounding across flooded curbs, flying toward the river and the little dock. He never remembered that wild flight, for he was conscious of nothing but his savage hunger for vengeance.

The little dock, he found, had been washed away, but one boat was pulled up on the bank. He slid down the bank in a welter of wet and slimy mud and almost fell into the river. He scrambled back up and got into the boat, panting, drenched, smeared. His feet sank into deep water and he had to turn the boat over on its side to empty it. He found the oars, slippery and cold, and then the rain began again, brightened by lightning, torn by the wind. He pushed the boat into the river, and the river caught it and almost wrenched it from him, for the water was high and roaring and rushing and swirling. He finally struggled into the boat and sat down, and he did not notice that his hands were bleeding, for the boat spun out into the river and swung into circles and fled out into the night.

It was a long time before he could control it, and now he was sweating and shivering in the fresh rain, and the river flared into violence under the lightning and then became a silent and hidden thing in the dark, tumultuous as if alive and filled with fury. He fought both the river and the boat. Looking over his shoulder, he could see the dusky bulk of the island behind him, lighted swiftly and regularly, its trees tossing, and it was like a struggling ship about to founder. His foot felt for the crop he had thrown into the boat, and he clenched his teeth and fought to gain the island in all that wildness and bellowing storm and night.

He was a strong man, and he was still young, but if he had not been impelled by his rage and his new fear for Jenny, he would have been swept down the river, the boat would have been swamped, and he would have died in the water. But all the intensity of his nature was driving him toward the island, all the frustration and anger and despair and suffering of the past months, all the shame and the insults, the rejection and the jeers, the hopelessness. It seemed to him that Mavis was in the boat with him, laughing in the thunder, her golden hair flying in the wind, her face gleeful in the lightning. “You were a fool,” he said to her, “a silly, thoughtless, soulless fool. But you didn’t deserve that! No, you didn’t deserve that I wanted to kill you many times, but I wouldn’t have killed you, Mavis. No, I wouldn’t have killed you and let you die alone in all that pain. If I had known, I’d have stayed by your bed, comforting you. If I had arrived before you died, I’d have been there, Mavis, for I loved you for many years, and loved you in a way, I think, even after you were dead, Mavis, even when I hated you.”

For the first time, even in the frenzy of his thoughts and the savagery of his purpose, he could feel sorrow for Mavis, dead in her youth, and pity, and regret.

The rain dashed into his face, and he gritted his teeth and bent body and oars against the foaming water, and the boat heaved up and down between waves and fought with the swift current. Strange thoughts ran over his mind like dreams, like convolutions of nightmares. Then the boat grated on stones, and he had reached the island.

He sat there, huddled and soaking, gasping and trying to get his breath, his bloody hands sliding on the oars. Then he could stand up, and jump to the slippery bank, and pull the boat up on it and throw the oars beside it. He reached for his crop, fumbling in the flaming dark, and he turned and climbed the flooded path, feeling for it when he could not see it. When he had reached the top, his clothing torn by the lashing bushes and trees, he had to halt to stop the laboring of his heart. Then he saw that the island was deep in the river, and the walls of it were hardly a curb above the swirl-

Harald Ferrier was sitting in his study reading, for no other room in the castle attracted him, nor could he stand any other room and especially not the one he had shared with his dead wife. He listened to the storm uneasily. Unlike Jonathan, he could not remember that the island had once been almost inundated, for he had been too young then, but he wondered how much more the water would rise and if the walls could keep it out from the higher land. During the lull in the late afternoon he had gone out to inspect the damage and had almost been flung headlong several times by the gale. The damage was very great. Some of the finest trees had been blown down and battered, and the gardens were completely destroyed. None of the windows of the castle had been broken because they were all mullioned and deep-set and narrow. But all the walks had disappeared and ran like brooks, and there was water at least a foot deep around the walls of the castle itself, where the earth could not absorb it.

There had been storms over the valley and the state before, but he could not recall one as bad as this. He congratulated himself that he had thought to return yesterday, before it broke, otherwise he would have had to stay in Hambledon, and possibly in his father’s house. He winced at the thought. He had never liked that house, had never felt that he was welcome there but only endured, a stranger tolerated becausing water. He stood and looked at it, as it appeared and disappeared in the lightning, and he thought, It will be almost covered by morning. He went on, falling, staggering, fighting, toward the faint light in the distance.

he was harmless and bothered no one and never interfered, and because he had learned to smile when he was the most miserable and lonely and forgotten. Even though he visited his mother occasionally, he still felt like a guest and never believed that she had ever liked him in spite of her gentle ways and kindness. She had never cared for anyone but his brother, he thought, and his father had never cared for anyone but his older son. It was a beautiful house, but Harald had not found it beautiful and never had thought of it as home.

As he was not vengeful by nature, or reckless, or bitter, he had not felt resentful all those years. He had made his own life. By temperament he was easy and adaptable and tolerant. It would have made him happy to have been loved and not overlooked, but as that happiness had been denied him, he had eventually accepted the fact. Now all he desired was Jenny and peace and his painting, and travel and ease and laughter and good wine and dinners. The world was a brutal place and so he had gracefully and smilingly retreated from it, never questioning it, never arguing with it, never fighting it, as Jonathan had always done from earliest childhood. Harald accepted what the world permitted him to accept, and he had no quarrel with it, for life was as it was and only a fool “kicked against the pricks.” If he reached for something and the world of men denied it to him, he would search for something else he could have without a struggle. He had reached for women, and for Mavis, but never had pressed them, never had urged them, never had seduced them. They saw his hand and they took it, laughing, and he laughed with them. He had desired only the prettiest women, for he hated flaws and mediocrity, and his affairs had been gay if not very passionate. He told himself that he was—happily—incapable of strong attachments and emotion.

With the exception of Jenny Heger. As no woman he had ever wanted had rejected him, he felt that eventually Jenny would be “sensible” and accept him, too, in marriage and in a carefree and joyous future. She had hardly spoken to him since that ridiculous encounter in the grotto, but she was not angry with him. She seemed to be suffering and brooding. What an intense young lady! In time, he would laugh her out of her shyness and her moods and they would take, together, what they would be permitted to take. Once or twice it did occur to him that Jenny would never change, and then he would feel, as if it were a stronger echo of his gently neglected and painful childhood, a spasm of very real and intolerable pain. For a man who was not very resolute by nature, he felt a stiffening of resolution when it came to Jenny.

The studio was lighted by oil lamps, as all the rooms were so lighted, and they flickered as gusts of wind found their way even around the locked and secure windows. Harald listened to the storm and it seemed to him that it was getting much worse, and he saw the lightning through the windows and shrank involuntarily at some of the more boisterous of the thunderclaps. He tried to take his mind off the storm, and looked with satisfaction at some of his canvases standing against the walls, and his easel, with a fresh canvas waiting. He would do another portrait of Jenny. He would sell this one, as he could have sold the first many times over. He thought of Jenny and stood up and slowly strolled about the studio. Jenny was in the library downstairs, where she always “lurked,” and he hesitated. He wondered if she was frightened now, and then he decided she was not. She had not been frightened yesterday or last night. He had tried to talk with her at meals, but though she had answered him, she gave him the impression that she was hardly aware of him. Only once had she spoken voluntarily to him and that was to ask him when he would take her to their lawyers and conclude their contract.

“Patience, Jenny,” he had said. “Besides, it is my information that the lawyer most concerned is not in town just now.”

Suddenly he wanted to see Jenny, and it was an aching desire in him. He had the excuse of the storm, and so he lightly ran downstairs—he did everything lightly—and went to the library and pushed open the carved wooden door. There was Jenny, crouched under a lamp and reading, and she looked up at him blankly when he entered.

“I thought perhaps you were afraid,” he said with his genial smile.

“Of what?”

“Well, the storm. It does sound awful, doesn’t it?”

She frowned and listened, then nodded. She gazed at him with her great blue eyes, in which the lamplight danced, waiting for him to leave, and she pushed aside some of her fallen black hair impatiently. She was dressed in one of her least becoming frocks, a dull lilac cotton with a little collar of coarse lace at the neck, and it made her white throat whiter and took away the color of her beautiful lips.

“You know there has been a lot of damage,” said Harald, still standing.

“I know. But it can be planted again.” Jenny paused. “My father’s rose beds have gone.”

“I’m sorry, Jenny.”

She smiled briefly. “I am, too.”

There was another pause, and then to their mutual amazement they heard a banging at the hall door, and a shout. They stared at each other, disbelieving. The servants had already retired to their rooms, and Harald said, “Who, in God’s name, can that be?” He went to the hall and walked down its echoing marble floor, and pulled back the bolts on the doors. It swung in on him violently, and he cried out, and Jenny came into the hall also.

If they had been incredulous before they were stunned into speechlessness now, as a battered, drenched, torn and muddy figure staggered into the hall, pouring with water, creating instant puddles on the shining floor. It was heaving and panting, and its hands were bleeding, and it was grasping a crop. Its black eyes were quite mad and staring, and all its hair was spiked and upright like a drowned bush.

“For God’s sake,” said Harald, and stepped back. “Jon!”

Jenny stood behind him, frowning and staring, throwing back her hair, her mouth opening in amazement. The light of the tall and flickering lamps, shaped like torches, which decorated the medieval hall along the walls, bent before the wind that roared through the open door. Jonathan looked at his brother and saw no one else, and he reached behind him and closed the door, and then leaned against it, breathing stertorously. Harald looked at him, still incredulous, and then when he saw Jonathan’s face more clearly, he stepped back more and his ruddy brows drew together over his eyes and much of his high color disappeared.