for some three weeks i had lain racked and shriveled in a nervous, delirious fever. it left me at last, the ghost of my old self, to face once more the problems of a ruined life. for many days these gave me no concern, or only in a fitful, indifferent manner. i was content to sip the dew of convalescence, to slumber and to cherish my exhaustion, and the others disturbed me but little. my recovery once assured, they left me generally to myself, scarce visiting me more often than was necessary for the administering of food or medicine. sometimes one or other of them would come and sit by my bedside awhile and exchange with me a few desultory remarks; but this was seldom, and grew, with my strength more so, for the earth was brilliant with summer outside and naturally fuller of attractions than a sick-room.
their neglect troubled me little at first; but by and by, when the first idle ecstasy of convalescence was beginning to deepen into a sense of responsibilities that i should soon have to gather up and adjust, it woke day by day an increasing uneasiness in my soul. as yet, it is true, the immediate past i could only call up before my mental vision as a blurred picture of certain events the significance of which was suggestive only. gradually, however, detail by detail, the whole composition of it concentrated, on the blank sheet of my mind, and stood straight before me terribly uncompromising in its sternness of outline. had i any reason to suppose, in short, that my share in modred’s death was known to or guessed at by my father, jason or zyp? on that pivot turned the whole prospect of my future; for as to myself, were the secret to remain mine alone, i yet felt that i could make out life with a tolerable degree of resignation in the certain knowledge that modred had forgiven me before he died, for a momentary mad impulse, the provocation to which had been so bitter—the reaction from which had been so immediate and so equally impulsive.
of my father, i may say at once, i had little fear. his manner toward me when, as he did occasionally, he came and sat by me for a half-hour or so, was marked by a gentleness and affection i had never known him to exhibit before. pathetic as it was, i could sometimes almost have wished it replaced by a sterner mood, a more dubious attitude; for my remorse at having so bereaved him became a barbed sting in presence of his new condescension to me that dated from the afternoon of my appeal to him, and was intensified by our common loss.
of zyp i hardly dared to think, or dared to do more than tremulously hover round the thought that modred’s death had absolved me from my promise to him to avoid her. still the thought was there and perhaps i only played with self-deception when i affected to fly from it out of a morbid loyalty to him that was gone. i could not live with and not long for her with all the passion i was capable of.
therefore it was that i dreaded any possible disclosure of a suspicion on her part—dreaded it with a fever of the mind so fierce that it must truly have retarded my recovery indefinitely had not a counter-irritant occurred to me, in certain moods, in the form of a thought that perhaps, after all, my deed might not so affright one who, on her own showing, found a charm in the contemplation of evil.
but it was jason i feared most. something—i can hardly give it a name—had come to me within the last few weeks that seemed to be the preface to an awakening of the moral right on my part. in the unfolding of this new faculty i was startled and distressed to observe deformities in my brother where i had before seen nothing but manly beauty and a breezy recklessness that i delighted in. beautiful bodily, i and all must still think him, though it had worried me lately to often observe an expression in his blue eyes that was only new to my new sense. this i can but describe, with despair of the melodramatic sound of it, as poisonous. the pupils were as full and purple as berries of the deadly nightshade.
it was not, however, his eyes only that baffled me. i saw that he coveted any novelty of sensation greedily, and that sooner than forego enjoyment of it he would ruthlessly stamp down whatever obstacle to its attainment crossed his path.
now i knew in my heart that his hitherto indifference to zyp was an affectation born only of wounded vanity, and that such as he could never voluntarily yield so piquant a prize to homelier rivals. i recalled, with a brooding apprehension, certain words of his on that fatal morning, that seemed intended to convey, at least, a dark suspicion as to the manner of modred’s death. probably they were bolts shot at random with a sinister object—for i could conceive no shadow of direct evidence against me. in that connection they might mean much or little; in one other i had small doubt that they meant a good deal—this in fact, that, if i got in his way with zyp, down i should go.
daily probing and analyzing such darkly dismal problems as these, i slowly crawled through convalescence to recovery.
it was a sweltering morning in early july that i first crept out of doors, with zyp for my companion. it was happiness to me to have her by my side, though as yet my weak and watery veins could prickle to no ghost of passion. i had thought that life could hold nothing for me ever again but present pain and agonized retrospects. it was not so. the very smell of the freshly watered roads woke a shadowy delight in me as we stepped over the threshold. the buoyant thunder of the river, as it leaped under the old street bridge seemed to gush over my heart with a cleansing joyousness that left it white and innocent again.
we crossed the road and wandered by a zig-zag path to the ancient close, where soft stretches and paddocks of green lawn, “immemorial elms” and scattered buildings antique and embowered wrought such an harmonious picture as filled my tired soul with peace.
here we sat down on an empty bench. i had much to question zyp about—much to reflect on and put into words—but my neglected speech moved as yet on rusty hinges.
“zyp,” i said presently, in a low voice; “tell me—where is he buried?”
“in the churchyard—st. john’s, under the hill, renny.”
not once until now had i touched upon this subject or mentioned modred’s name to any one of them, and a great longing was upon me to get it over and done with.
“who went?”
“dad and jason and dr. crackenthorpe.”
“zyp, nobody has asked me anything about it. don’t you all want to know how—how it happened?”
“he was caught in the weeds—you said so yourself, renny.”
vainly i strove to get under her words; intuition was, for the time being, a sluggish quantity in me.
“yes; but——” i began, when she took me up softly.
“dad said it was all clear and that we were never to bother you about it at all.”
a sigh of gratitude to heaven escaped me.
“and i for one,” said zyp, “don’t intend to.”
something in her words jarred unaccountably on my sick nerves.
“at first,” she said, just glancing at me, “dad thought there ought to be an inquest, but dr. crackenthorpe was so set against it that he gave in.”
“dr. crackenthorpe? why was——”
“he said that juries took such an idiotic view of a father’s responsibilities; that dad might be censured for letting the boy run wild; that in any case the family’s habits of life would be raked over and cause a scandal that might make things very uncomfortable; that it was a perfectly plain case of drowning, and that he was quite willing to give a certificate that death was due to a rupture of some blood vessel in the brain following exhaustion from exposure—or something of that sort.”
“and he did?”
“yes, at last, after a deal of talk, and he was buried quietly and there was an end of it.”
not quite an end, zyp—not quite an end!
she was very gentle and patient with me all the morning, and my poor soul brimmed over with gratitude. my pulses began even to flicker a little with hope that things might be as they were before the catastrophe. after all she was a very independent changeling and, if there existed in her heart any bias in my favor, jason might find himself quite baffled in his efforts to control her inclinations.
presently i turned to the same overclouding subject.
“what happened the day i was taken bad, zyp?”
“jason found you on the stairs, talking rubbish. they carried you to bed and you hardly left off talking rubbish for weeks. don’t you remember anything of it?”
“nothing, after—after i saw him lying there so dreadful.”
“ah, it was ugly, wasn’t it? well, you must have wandered off somewhere—anywhere; and the rest of us to the parlor. there dad and the doctor fell to words. they had spent all the night over that stupid drink, sleeping and quarreling by fits and couldn’t remember much about it. they had not heard any noise upstairs, either of them; but suddenly the doctor pointed to something hanging out of dad’s pocket. ‘why, you must have gone to the boy’s room some time,’ he said. ‘look there!’ dad took it out and it was modred’s braces, all twisted up and stuffed into his pocket.”
“modred’s braces?”
“yes; they all knew them, for they were blue, you know—the color he liked. dad afterward thought he must have put them there to be out of the way while he was carrying modred upstairs, but at the time he was furious. ‘d’ye dare to imply i had a hand in my son’s death?’ he shrieked. ‘i imply nothing; i mean no offense; they are plain for every one to see,’ said the doctor, going back a little. i thought he was frightened and that dad would jump at his throat like a weasel, and i clapped my hands, waiting for the battle. but it never came, for dad turned pale and called for brandy, and there was an end of it.”
this story of the doctor’s horrible suggestion wrought only one comfort in me—it warmed my heart with a great heat of loyalty to one who, i knew, for all his faults, could never be guilty of so inhuman a wickedness.
“i should like to kill that doctor,” i said, fiercely and proudly.
“so should i,” said zyp. “i believe he would bleed soot like a chimney.”
zyp was my companion during the greater part of that day and the next. her manner toward me was uniformly gentle and attentive. sometimes during meals i would become conscious of jason’s eyes fixed upon one or other of us in a curious stare that was watchful and introspective at once, as if he were summing up the voiceless arguments of counsels invisible, while never losing sight of the fact that we he sat in judgment on were already convicted in his mind. this, for the time being, did not much disturb me. i was lulled to a sense of false security by the gracious championship i thought i now could rely upon.
it was the evening of the second day and we three were in the living-room together; jason reading at the window. zyp had been so kind to me that my heart was very full indeed, and now she sat by me, one hand slipped into mine, the other supporting her little pointed chin, while her sweet, flower-stained eyes communed with other, it seemed, than affairs of earth. a strange wistful tenderness had marked her late treatment of me; a pathetic solicitude that was inexpressibly touching to one so forlorn. suddenly she rose and i heard jason’s book rustle in his hand.
“now, little boy,” she said, “’tis time you were in bed.”
then she leaned toward me and whispered:
“is he so unhappy? what has he done for zyp’s sake?”
in a moment she bent and kissed me, with a soft kiss, on the forehead, and shooting a parthian glance of defiance at jason, who never spoke or moved, ran from the room.
all my soul thrilled with a delicious joy. zyp, who had refused to kiss him, had kissed me. the ecstasy of her lips’ touch blotted out all significance her words might carry.
half-stunned with triumphant happiness, i climbed the stairs and, getting into bed, fell into a luminous dream of thought in which for the moment was no place for apprehension.
i did not even hear jason enter or shut the door, and it was only when he shook me roughly by the shoulder that i became conscious of his presence in the room.
he was standing over me, and the windows of his soul were down, and through them wickedness grinned like a skull.
“i’ve had enough of this,” he said in a terrible low voice. “d’you want to drive me to telling that i know it was you who killed modred?”
