Salome and the Head/Chapter 19

by E. Nesbit

 

CHAPTER XIX

RELEASE

To be arrested in error for a crime of which one knows nothing is a trying incident; but one survives it. Edmund Templar was little the worse for his experience. Indeed, it is possible that his character was permanently benefited—steadied, as it were, by the contact with the iron-strong realities that clip the murderer like the teeth of a rat-trap. At any rate, whatever else he does, he will never do murder. He knows now that he is not the desperate character which he believed himself to be, and he will never again say, even in his nobler moments, that if he had met this or that man face to face, he would have shot him, no matter how personally repugnant may be to him this man or that.

The palpitating publicity of a Coroner’s Court is no light thing; but when your heart is vibrating to a different measure—to a measure of immeasurable grief and pity and regret and love, the greater acts as opiate to the meaner pain. You come through it somehow. Sylvia did.

And even John Ferrier, least fortunate of the three whom the law, wide-armed, clutched, faced quite gallantly the sentence of two years’ imprisonment for that old forgery, the sentence which he braved for a woman whom he knew for some thirty-six hours, and whom he knows as no other man will ever know her. He faced the sentence, but Uncle Mosenthal saw to it that he did not have to endure it.

“There are wires and wires,” he said, “wires that you see not, that continually cross and cross and intertwine. And it is not a few of them that I hold in my hand. And it is little enough to pull wires for the child of my heart—I, Uncle Moses, who was not here when most he needed was. And my Berlin mission was all they desired. I am the beloved of princes; so fear not, my pigeon—he who suffers for you shall not suffer long. And you to the Riviera go, with the good Dusa, and look at the sea and grow strong and forget; and Uncle Moses will for you a beautiful villa find—a villa with a beautiful name. No more of The House With No Address.”

The House With No Address was indeed no more. Its history, its architecture, its mechanical contrivances, its secret passage, its approaches, its inmates, had been for a day the admiration and despair of the congested Press. And the crowds that gathered before the fronts of the houses that concealed it, and the mews with the mysterious garage, had to be controlled and moved on by the police.

Our drama is as improbable as life itself. Can one label it more definitely? Its penultimate scene is at the Ringwood house, where the Aunt and the uncle toast their feet at the apple-wood fire.

“There’s no wood like it,” says the Uncle. “I never let them waste the orchard thinnings.”

Mr. Templar is there, in his demure dinner jacket—a little thinner, a little more serious. To be the hero in the story of Salome and the Head takes something out of a man, I assure you.

“It’s most shocking,” the Aunt is saying, and she prides herself on the tact that withheld her from saying, “This is what comes of these goings-on.” “I’m not straight-laced, Heaven knows, but the scandals that came out in that case—well! And that house. You see—it makes you see there must always have been something wrong, or why be so deceitful and careful, not having any address, and a house inside two other house, like Chinese puzzles. Up to no good, you may depend, from the very beginning. I always said and I always will say. . .”

“My dear Louise,” the Uncle interposes, “the girl wanted to keep straight. That’s why she had that rummy house—to keep off. . . to keep off,” he adds lamely, with an eye to the proprieties and the Aunt’s feelings, “to keep off undesirable acquaintances.”

The Aunt daresays.

“You may say what you like,” says the Uncle—there was a passage at the inquest which has reassured him and makes him generous—“that girl was straight as a die.”

The Aunt comes as near to a snort as the daughter of a minor canon of Worcester can come.

“You’re quite mistaken,” the Uncle’s generosity expands; “she was perfectly straight. Where is she now? Tut, tut—I saw it in The Telegraph—Did you notice, Edmund?”

“She is at Juan les Pins,” says Edmund shortly.

“Of course. We drove over there from Cannes.” The Aunt remembers it perfectly. “All sand and pine woods. Just the place for a déclassée actress. Poor girl, it was a pity.”

The connection between sands and pine woods and actresses déclassée is obviously plain to the Aunt as the nose on anybody’s face.

“I daresay she’ll marry well—when things have blown over a bit. That lame boy. All alone in the house with her. And Mr. Ferrier behaving as he did! It all tells against a girl. It all tells,” the Uncle opines, “but these things blow over. People are much more charitable than they used to be.”

“People are less particular about right and wrong, Henry. That’s what you mean. It’s the Board School Education and the spread of printing among the lower classes. It’s breaking down all our landmarks. Nothing’s wrong now. I may be old-fashioned, but I do believe in respecting the Ten Commandments.”

“And which do you think she hasn’t respected?” says Templar, using the poker a little violently.

“Oh, well,” says the Aunt, as though deploring the breakage of every commandment and the very stone tablets themselves to boot, “there’s one thing I’m thankful for. These profane Salome dances have been stopped by law. I can’t think what the Government was about not to stop it long ago.”

“Perhaps the Prime Minister admired the lady’s dancing,” suggests the Uncle, with a decorous little chuckle.

“You never know, do you?” the Aunt agrees. “These Smart Set people. And that sort of girl attracts men.” She speaks as though the attraction were a wilful vice.

“Well, whatever she’s done, she’s paid for it, poor girl,” says the Uncle.

And then Templar stands up.

“She’s done nothing,” he says, “nothing. She’s the victim of circumstances.”

“They always are,” says the Aunt, and sniffs.

“It’s not her fault. Look here. I want to tell you something.”

“Better not, dear boy,” says the Uncle hastily. “Let bygones be bygones.”

“Bygones? What I mean to tell you is—that I’m engaged to be married to her.”

“But she expressly said you weren’t,” the Uncle is surprised into saying, “at the inquest. The Coroner asked that.”

“Ah,” says Templar, and the tenderness in his voice sets the helmet on the Aunt’s armed hostility, “that was her noble unselfishness. She didn’t want to compromise me.”

“I’m glad she had so much decency,” says the Aunt. “Of course you’re not engaged. How could you be engaged and the girl not know it?”

“I’m going to her tomorrow,” says Edmund, standing up. “I got her address from her uncle this morning—and, Aunt Louise, believe me, she’s everything that you’d wish my wife to be—and when we’re married I shall bring her to you. You’ve always been like my mother,” he adds appealingly.

“Henry,” says the Aunt, “be so kind as to light my bedroom candle. I’m too much upset to bear any more. We’ll talk this over in the morning, Edmund.”

But in the morning Edmund is gone.

•••••

It was in the white sand by the pine trees at Juan les Pins that our hero and heroine met again. They had not met, except with a sea of faces between them at the Coroner’s Court, since that day whose dawn had found her asleep in his arms. He went to her hotel. Uncle Moses, rubbing his hands at the prospect of the happy ending of Sandra’s tragic story, had joyfully yielded her address. The hotel people had indicated the direction of her walk. And between sea and pines he found her. She was sitting on the white sand, gazing out towards the Ile Sainte Marguerite—the Island of Prisoners.

“Sandra,” he said, and she turned her pale face towards him.

“Why have you come?” she said.

The question was keenly embarrassing.

“To—to fetch you,” he said, trampling the embarrassment under the foot of a tremendous self-assertion.

“Why didn’t you come before?”

“I thought you ought to be quiet a little,” he said, “and I did not know your address till the day before yesterday.” It was impossible to explain to her the doubts and hesitations that he had fought and conquered, but he felt rather noble as he remembered them.

“We will be married at Nice,” he went on confidently, tenderly, “at the Consul’s. My aunt and uncle long to know you,” he added falsely. “Oh, Sandra, what is it? Haven’t you forgiven me?”

“No,” said she.

“Can’t you forgive me?”

And “No” she said again.

“But I love you,” he said, as though that settled everything.

“No,” she said for the third time.

“I don’t love you? If you only knew!”

“I do know. You don’t love me—you never have loved me. You don’t know what love means. Denny knew. He died for me. But you. . . the moment anything happened—anything that wasn’t romance and pretty kisses and Family Herald sentiment—you sheered off, hid in a corner, left me to do the best I could. And you wrote me that letter.”

“I was mad,” he said. “I found. . . I found the body. For a little while I was quite mad. I did doubt you—I don’t deny it; I was a fool—I was a beast. But almost directly I got sane again. I tried to come to you, and they arrested me.”

“And I,” she said, and turned her tragic eyes on his, “I found the head—and your letter. But I never thought that you were a murderer. And you—you believed that of me.”

“I was a fool,” he said again, weakly.

“And if I had believed it of you, what do you think I should have done? I should have gone to you—helped you—stood by you—died for you, if that could have done you any good. But you—you believed that I had done that—and done it for love of you—and you skulked away and left me to bear it alone.”

“You’re most unjust,” he said, and felt what he said, bitterly. “It was a most ghastly shock finding the body.”

“I danced with the head. I danced with it a second time, so that someone I loved—oh, not as I loved you, and as you pretended you loved me!—so that someone I loved should have a few hours of peace, and die at home and not in a prison cell. Go away! I’ve no more to say to you.”

“But. . . you can’t mean it,” he choked on the words. “You’re over-wrought, dearest. I love you. Forgive me.”

“Never in this world,” she said. “Go.”

Then the cur that lies curled up asleep in all of us awoke in him, and growled.

“Oh—I see,” he said. “I’m sorry I was so dense. You were quickly consoled.”

“Consoled?” she said, in what was almost a cry.

The cur showed its teeth.

“Oh—I see,” said Mr. Edmund Templar again: “of course there’s some other man.”

It was then that she stood up and looked at him.

“Yes,” she said, “there is another man. Thank God there is another man, a different sort of man, a man who gave up his liberty for me—and for you. He thought you were the murderer—I never thought it, but he did. He thought you had had the misfortune to kill that man and the courage to shoot yourself—for me. He didn’t know you as I do—did he? And to give me a few hours with you—and to make your dying hours peaceful—but you weren’t dying, not you—you were trying to get away from being mixed up in my troubles, weren’t you? He went to prison for us—for me and you.”

“Oh—that’s the man, is it?” said Templar. “Well—two years is pretty light for a forger and. . .”

“There’s no sentence for cowards,” she said.

“Sandra, I love you,” he cried, in a last appeal. He knew it to be vain, but the situation demanded it.

“And I,” she said, “love the man who sacrificed everything for me. And when he comes out of prison I shall be at the gate. And if he’ll have me, I shall marry him.”

“Ah,” said Templar, the cur rampant in him. “And you’ll be Lady Ferrier someday, won’t you? That’s always something.”

And at that last outrage she softened.

“Ah, don’t!” she said: “you won’t like to remember that you said that. Remember, we did love each other—for a little while.”

•••••

But when he thinks of Salome’s story, which is also his story, it is just that one last yelp of the cur in him that Edmund Templar cannot forget.

The Aunt, when she heard that, after all, there was to be no marriage between her nephew and the dancing woman, summed up the situation thus:

“I never believed that Providence would allow such a thing. Never. It would have broken my heart. I knew it could never be permitted. And I was so terrified that it might happen. And poor, dear Edmund, how shamefully she deceived him! The girl must have been mad. To refuse Edmund! But there was something very queer and underhand about the whole business, even before the crimes began. And that wretched cripple, too. Ah, well, ‘there’s a Divinity doth shape our ends.’ I’ve always been convinced of that.”

•••••

They let prisoners out very early in the morning. At eight, I think. At eight o’clock on a March morning the sun can shine very gaily. The old walls stand up strong and spiky against the new sky. The great gates open, and tired people come out, blinking, into the light. Sometimes they come out into a world where no one but the police wants them. It must be a terrible thing to be wanted by no one but the police.

But sometimes it happens that a man coming out of hell finds heaven waiting for him, hands that implore his hands—a face that his coming illuminates, as a candle lights up a Chinese lantern—eyes that see nothing in the world but his face, a heart that beats at his coming to a tune of wild gladness. And all that his long prison life has painted for him as lost forever, out of reach, out of hope, is waiting for him in the chill sweet morning, waiting with hands held out, saying: “Take me, for I am thine!”

 

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