morning brought a pitcher of comfort with it on its gossamer wings. who, at 17, can wake from restoring sleep to find the june sun on his face and elect to breakfast on bitter wormwood, with the appetizing fry of good country bacon caressing his nostrils through every chink of the boards? indeed, i was not born to hate, or to any decided vice or virtue, but was of those who, taking a middle course, are kicked to the wall or into the gutter as the fates have a fancy.
i was friendly with myself, with jason—almost with zyp, who had so bedeviled me. after all, i thought, the measure of her regard for me might be more in a winning friendliness than in embraces such as she had bestowed upon modred.
therefore i dressed in good heart, chatting amiably with jason, who, i could not help noticing, was at some pains to study me curiously.
such reactionary spirits are the heritage of youth. they decline with the day. my particular relapse happened, maybe, ungenerously early, for it was at breakfast i noticed the first tremulous vibrations of zyp’s war trumpet. clearly she had guessed the reason of the change in my manner toward her yesterday evening and was bent upon disabusing my mind of the presumptuous supposition that i held any monopoly whatsoever of her better regard. to this end she showered exaggerated attentions upon modred and my father—even jason coming in for his share. she had little digs at my silence and boorishness that hugely delighted the others. she slipped a corner of fat bacon into my tea and spilled salt over my bread and jam, and all the time i had to bear my suffering with a stoic heart and echo the merriment, which i did in such sardonic fashion as to call down fresh banter for my confusion. at our worst, it must be confessed, we were not a circle with a refined sense of humor. but when we rose, and zyp brushed rudely by me with a pert toss of her head, i felt indeed as if life no longer held anything worth the striving after.
i walked out into the yard to be alone, but jason followed me. some tenderness for old comradeship sake stirred in him momentarily, i think, for his blue eyes were good as they met mine.
“what an ass you are, renny,” he said; “to make such a to-do about the rubbish!”
“i don’t know what you mean,” i said, in miserable resentment. “i’m making no to-do about anything.”
my chest felt like a stone, and i could have struck him or any one.
“oh, i can see,” said he.
“see what you like,” i replied, furiously, “but don’t bother me with it. i’ve nothing to do with your fancies.”
“oh, very well,” he said, coolly; “i don’t want to interfere, i’m sure.”
i bounced past him and strode out of the yard. my blood was humming in my veins; the sunny street looked all glazed with a shining gray. i walked on and on, scarcely knowing whither i went. presently i climbed st. catherine’s hill and flung myself down on the summit. below me, a quarter of a mile away, the old city lay in the hollow cup of its down. who, of all its 17,000 souls, could ever stir my pulses as the little stranger from the distant shadowy forest could? we had no forests round winton. perhaps if we had the spirit of the trees would have colored my life, too, so that i might have scorned “the blind bow-god’s butt shaft.”
no doubt i was young to make such capital out of a little boyish disappointment. do you think so? then to you i must not appeal. oh, my friend! we are not all jack-o’-lanterns at 17, and the fire of unrequited affection may burn fiercer in the pure air of youth than in the vitiated atmosphere of manhood. anyhow believe me that to me my misery was very real and dreadful. think only, you who have plucked the fruit and found it bitter—you whose disenchantment of life did not begin till life itself was waning—what it must be to feel hopeless at that tender age.
all day long i lay on the hill or wandered about the neighboring downs, and it was not till the shadows of the trees were stretching that i made up my mind to return and face out the inevitable.
i was parched and feverish, and the prospect of a plunge in the river on my way home came to me with a little lonely thrill as of solace to my unhappiness.
there was a deep pool at a bend of the stream, not far from where zyp and i had sat yesterday afternoon (was it only yesterday?) which we three were much in the habit of frequenting on warm evenings; and thither i bent my steps. this part of the water lay very private and solitary, and was only to be reached by trespassing from the road through a pretty thick-set blackthorn hedge—a necessity to its enjoyment which, i need not say, was an attraction to us.
as i wriggled through our individual “run” in the hedge and, emerging on the other side, raised my face, i saw that a naked figure was already seated by the side of the running pool, which i was not long in identifying as modred’s.
i hesitated. what reason had i for hobnobbing with mine enemy, as, in the bitterness of my heart, i called him? i could not as yet speak to him naturally, i felt, or meet him without resentment. where was the object in complicating matters? i turned, on the thought, to go, and again hesitated. should he see me before i had made my escape, would he not attribute it to embarrassment on my part and crow triumphant over my discomfiture? ah, why did i not act on my first impulse? why, why? the deeps of perdition must resound with that forlorn little word.
when a second time the good resolve came to me, it was too late. he rose and saw me and, under his shading hand, even at that distance, i could mark the silent grin of mockery on his face. i walked deliberately toward him, my hands in my pockets, my cap shading my eyes.
“aren’t you coming to bathe?” he said, when i drew near. “it’ll cool your temper.”
i could have struck him, but i answered nothing and only began to undress.
“where have you been all day? we were wondering, zyp and i, as we lay in the meadow out there.”
still i answered nothing, but i knew that my hands trembled as i pulled off my coat and waistcoat.
he stood watching me a little while in silence, then said: “you seem to have lost your tongue, old renny. has it followed your heart because zyp talks for two?”
i sprung up, but he eluded me and, with a hateful laugh, leaped on the moment into the deep center of the pool. a horrible tightness came round my throat. half-undressed as i was i plunged after him all mad with passion. he rose near me, and seeing the fury of my face, dived again, and i followed. it took but an instant, and my life was wrecked. we met among the weeds at the bottom, and he jumped from me. as he rose i clutched him by one foot, and swiftly passed a great sinew of weed three or four times around his ankle. it held like a grapnel and would hold; for, though he was a fair swimmer, he was always frighted and nervous in the face of little difficulties. then swerving away, i rose again, with laboring lungs, to the surface.
barely had my drenched eyes found the daylight again, when the hideous enormity of my crime broke into my brain like the toll of a death bell. the water near me was heaving slightly and some welling bubbles swayed to the surface. they were the drowning gasps of my brother—my own brother, whom i was murdering.
i gave a thin, wretched scream and sunk again into the deep hole beneath me. he was jerking convulsively, and his hands clutched vainly at his feet and slipped away in a dying manner. i tore at the weed to unwind it—only to twist it into new fetters. i pulled frantically at its roots. i felt that i should go mad if it did not yield. in a moment it came away in my hands and i shot upward, struggling. but the other poor body followed me sluggishly, and i seized it by the hair, with all my heart gone crazy, and towed it ashore.
his face, i thought, looked fallen away already and was no longer loutish or malicious. it seemed just a white, pathetic thing freed from suffering—and i would have given my life—ay, and my love—ten times over to see the same expression come back to it it had worn as it turned to me before he dived.
i fell on my knees beside him and broke into a passion of tears. i kissed, with no shame but a murderer’s, the wet forehead, and beat and pressed, in a futile agony too terrible for words, the limp unresisting hand against my breast. it seemed that he must wake if i implored him so frantically. but he lay quiet, with closed eyes, and the water ran from his white skin in trickling jerks and pauses.
in the midst of my useless anguish some words of jason’s recurred to me, and, seizing my coat for a pillow to his forehead, i turned him, with a shuddering horror of his limpness, upon his face. a great gush of water came with a rumble from his mouth, but he did not stir; and there i stood looking down upon him, my hand to my forehead, my mad eyes staring as cain’s must have stared when he wrought the deed of terror.
and i was cain—i who yesterday was a boy of loving impulses, i think; whose blackest crime might be some petty rebellion against the lesser proprieties; who had even hugged himself upon living on a loftier plane than this poor silenced victim of his brutality.
as the deadly earnest of my deed came home to my stunned mind, i had no thought of escape. i would face it out, confess and die. my father’s agony—for he loved us in his way, i believe; jason’s condemnation; zyp’s hatred; my own shame and torture—i put them all on one side to get full view of that black crossbeam and rope that i felt to be the only medicine for my sick and haunted soul.
as i stood, the sound of wheels on the road beyond woke me to some necessity of action. stumbling, as in a nightmare; not feeling my feet, but only the mechanical spring of motion, i hurried to the hedge side and looked over.
a carter with a tilt wagon was urging his tired team homeward.
“help!” i cried. “oh, come and help me!” and my voice seemed to me to issue from under the tilt of the wagon.
he “woa’d” up his horses, raised his hat from his forehead, wrinkled with hot weariness, and came toward me, his whip over his shoulder.
“what’s toward?” said he.
“my brother!” i gasped. “we were bathing together and he’s drowned.”
the man’s boorish face lighted up like a farthing rushlight. here was something horribly sordid enough for all the excitement he was worth. it would sweeten many a pot of swipes for the week to come.
“wheer be the body?” said he, eagerly.
“over yonder, on the grass. oh, won’t you help me to carry it home?”
he looked at the hedge critically.
“go, you,” he said, “and drag ’en hither. we’ll gat ’en over hedge together.”
i ran back to where it lay. it had collapsed a little to one side, and for an instant my breath caught in a wild thrill of hope that he had moved of himself. but the waxen hue of the face in the gathering dusk killed my emotion on its very issuing.
a strange loathing of the thing, lying so unresponsive, had in my race backward and forward sprung upon me, but before it could gain the mastery i had seized it under the arm-pits and was half-dragging, half-carrying it toward the road.
i was at the hedge before i knew it, and the red face of the carter was peering curiously down at the white heap beneath.
“harned ’en up,” he said. “my, but it’s cold. easy, now. take the toes of ’en. thart’s it—woa!” and he had it in his strong arms and shuffling heavily to the rear of his wagon, jerked back the flap of the tilt with his elbow and slid the body like a package into the interior.
“get your coat, man,” he cried, “and coom away.”
i had forgotten in the terror of it all my own half-dressed state, for i had stripped only to my underclothes, and my boots were still on my feet. mechanically i returned to the riverside, and hastily donning my coat and trousers, snatched up the other’s tumbled garments and ran back to the road.
