Boleslav, shaken to the foundations of his being by the awful truth the old man had revealed in his delirious ravings, felt he could no longer bear to gaze on such a hideous scene.

He fled from the house as if the imaginary flames which so terrified the maniac were pursuing him too, and he did not pause till he had left the village behind him, and found himself encompa.s.sed by the shadows of the ruins.

CHAPTER XX

The church clock had struck the midnight hour, by the time Boleslav got back to the spot where he had left Regina's soulless body.

A protecting darkness now veiled the white face, for the moon had pa.s.sed behind a bank of clouds, yet even from the darkness the great l.u.s.treless eyes gazed appealingly up at him, as if asking a question to which there was no answer here or hereafter.

He threw himself on his knees beside her, and, saying good-bye to the two stars, whose light had gone out, he tenderly closed their lids. She now looked as if she were asleep, and he breathed more freely. He felt something almost approaching a painful satisfaction as he watched by her. "You belong to me, only to me," he said. "No one else shall have any part or lot in you, in death as in life."

What he had resolved to do, in a spirit of defiance, as he left the murderer's house, in his present calmer mood still seemed the most commendable course to take. Past events appeared to him now like a brazen chain of guilt, to which for years one link after the other had been added. And into this chain had been forged, till it was made a component part of it, an unlawful love. For the sake of this love which was sinful as h.e.l.l and pure as heaven, that which only the silence of the night had witnessed should in the silence of the night be buried--buried with this corpse.

What retribution could be rendered by the poor tribunal of man, in a case in which fate had so clearly interfered and p.r.o.nounced sentence?

Would it not be profaning the dead body to drag it into the glare of publicity, and so expose it to the snivelling curiosity of the vulgar herd?

Should he permit the priest who had cursed her in her lifetime to consign her to the grave with a perfunctory blessing? And would not this involve her being laid in a coffin manufactured by her father's blood-guilty hands, followed by his accomplices as mourners, hooting and throwing stones?

Ah no; it should not be! She should be the prey, now she was dead, of no Schrandener wolves. He alone, for whom she had lived, for whom she had gone to meet her death, must prepare her last resting-place. He would hide her in the lap of mother earth, and smooth the turf so carefully above her that no body-s.n.a.t.c.her would ever discover and profane the holy spot. He lifted the corpse in his arms and carried it to the gra.s.s-plot. The moon had risen high in the heavens and shrouded the landscape in a veil of silver. From the dewy glistening gra.s.s rose the fragments of the old Diana statue in dazzling whiteness. Here he bore her and let her sink on the turf, her neck supported by the cracked pedestal, so that with her face turned towards the moon, she looked as if she had fallen asleep in a sitting position. Then he sought a burial-place. His eye fell on the black, four-cornered patch which Regina had intended for his father's grave. How vividly she came back to him, as she had looked then, in the full splendour of her sunburnt strength and beauty, driving the heavy spade into the ground with her naked foot, as if it had been a ramrod. If he had not then interrupted her in her work, he would to-day have been spared his.

The service of love she had wished to render his father it was now his duty to do for her. What could be simpler than to go on digging deeper the grave that she had begun that day, little dreaming it would be her own?

He fetched a spade from the kitchen, where the fire she had kindled was still smouldering, and began with all his strength to throw up the sod.

From time to time he paused and glanced at her. She seemed well content to sit there in the bright moonlight, and quietly contemplate his labours. Now and then, when the shadow of a cloud flickered on her face, he half fancied she moved, and was going to rise to her feet.

Then that tormenting scepticism that all experience in the presence of their beloved dead overwhelmed him. He called her name and rushed to her side. Her hand rested on Diana's head, which lay close to her in the gra.s.s. He dared not touch her, and stole back to his work, his face buried in his hands.

The grave began to grow deep, and he feared that soon he might not be able to climb on to the edge again. He went to get the flower-stand out of the green-house, on the shelves of which she had ranged the plates and dishes in such beautiful order.

"No one shall eat off them again!" he said, and dashed the earthenware crockery on the floor, where it broke to atoms. He placed the stand against the inside of the grave, to serve as a ladder, and then continued throwing out the soil as before.

By the time the clock in the village had boomed out the second hour of the morning, his melancholy task was finished. He had no coffin for her, but to prevent her lying on the black moist earth, he fetched from his bed, which she had always taken pains to keep so daintily clean and tidy, a quilt, and two feather pillows, and lined the grave with them.

And now the time for parting had come. He raised her in his arms, and bore her to the edge of the pit; then sitting down on the mound of turf to take breath, he lifted her head on to his knees. Never before had he been able to look at her so leisurely, for he had never dared trust himself to let his eyes rest on her for long. Now he studied lovingly every feature of the dead face, caressed the stiff cheeks, and wrung the water from her heavy curls. A cold shiver pa.s.sed through his frame.

He had held the wet body, with its dripping skirts, so long in his arms, that his own clothes were damp from the contact.

"Farewell!" he murmured, and kissed her on the forehead. He was going to kiss her on the lips, but drew back quickly.

"You disdained them in life," he said to himself, "so in death they may not belong to you."

And then he edged the corpse nearer the grave, and jumped down on to the top step of the stand. Slowly and cautiously he lifted her in, stretched her on the quilt, and cushioned her head on the soft pillows.

Once more he wanted to kiss her, but was afraid to leave the stand that bridged her feet; so he contented himself with stroking her hands, which he could reach from where he sat; then he clambered out of the grave, drawing the stand after him with the top of the spade-handle.

But afterwards he found he had forgotten to draw a corner of the quilt over her face, to prevent the soil from falling on it. "Flowers," he thought, "will do as well;" and he went in search of them. Under the trees in the park grew great ma.s.ses of anemones and bluebells, and there were violets and primroses, that she herself had cultivated, in the garden.

He gathered all he could see in the uncertain light. The anemones and primroses had closed their calyxes in sleep, but the violets looked up at him with their confiding blue eyes, as if inviting him to pluck them.

With his hands full he returned to the grave, and, as he looked down into it, stood spell-bound at what he saw. It was indeed a picture of almost magic loveliness. The moon had pa.s.sed its height, and, shining at the foot of the grave, illuminated it on the east side, so that the head, reposing in its deep resting-place, was thrown out clearly in relief, while the blood-stained body was hidden in darkest shadow.

The still, white face seemed to smile up at him, as if lapped in blissful dreams.

He threw the flowers aside, and, crouching down in the loose earth he had thrown up, stared and stared down on her, holding a solemn and silent wake.

Thoughts chased each other through his brain in a confused whirl, until gradually he came to a calmer and more rational frame of mind.

He reflected on how she had gone through life despised and guilt-laden, and yet unrepentant, appearing to be satisfied with her past rather than regretting it.

Once, in an hour of dire perplexity, he had asked himself whether it was the dull indifference of the brute or the wiles of a devil that made her will so strong and her conscience so lax, and he had not known what to answer.

To-day, when it was too late, her true nature was revealed to him.

No, she had not been a brute or a devil, but simply a grand and complete human being. One of those perfect, fully developed individuals such as Nature created before a herding social system, with its paralysing ordinances, bungled her handiwork, when every youthful creature was allowed to bloom unhindered into the fulness of its power, and to remain, in good and in evil, part and parcel of the natural life.

And as he pondered thus, it seemed to him that the mists which obscure the source of human existence from human knowledge had dispersed a little, and that he had been granted a deeper glimpse than most men into the fathomless gulf of the Unknown. What is generally called good and bad drifted about anchorless on the cloudy surface, but below lay dreaming in majestic strength, the Natural.

"And those whom Nature favours," he said aloud to himself, "she lets take root in her mysterious depths, so that they spring boldly into the light, with vision undimmed and conscience untrammelled by the befogging illusions of morality and worldly wisdom."

Such a highly favoured, completely-endowed human creature was this abused and abandoned woman.

"And I for whom she lived and died, have I deserved such a sacrifice?"

he meditated further. "Was I worthy of the trust and confidence she so unhesitatingly placed in me?

"With ruthless severity he sat in judgment on himself, and he came out of the ordeal anything but unscathed.

"Of course I belong to the other type," he thought, "to the people who are torn all their life long between right and wrong, and who lose their way in the fog. We regard the tribute Nature demands of us as impurity and vice, and yet the restraint of moral laws often appears to us hollow and far-fetched. Thus we vacillate perpetually between defiance and fear of them. We crave for the good opinion of the world, in which we don't believe, and tremble in face of its condemnation, which we despise and contemn in our hearts. Once I thought it would be an indelible disgrace to bury my father in this unconsecrated ground; now I should be glad if I had done so. Once I tried to forget my bitterness in the ambition of restoring my ancestral inheritance to its pristine glory; now I am delighted at the thought of shaking its dust from my feet. Then I held the Schrandeners to be mere barbarous savages; but to-day I awake to the fact that my own race has made them what they are.... _Then_ I thought this woman too degraded to take bread from her hand; to-day I am weeping by her grave. All my heart was centred on the extinguished flame of youth's first foolish fancy; I insisted on making the arbitress of my destiny a simpering, prudish minx, for whom I really had long ceased to care ... and I repulsed in horror the most splendid and satisfying of natural loves. But truly this natural love represented deadly sin, and tempted me to contaminate my blood.

"Yet when the worst came to the worst, and the life that flowed in my veins had burst from the control of all laws, human and divine, could I not have made atonement by paying the penalty of death?"

And then the question occurred to him, whether the body he talked so lightly of surrendering at his own caprice belonged exclusively to him?

What if it were the Fatherland's inviolable possession? Certainly, then, he was not privileged to desecrate it.

"It is well that in an hour of chaos like this, when good and evil, right and wrong, honour and dishonour, seem to be swaying about in hopeless confusion, and when the old G.o.d of our childhood with His Heaven seems to have vanished away ... it is well for swooning men to have one prop left to lean on, one firm rock to cling to, on which even to be shipwrecked were a delightful relief. Such a prop, such a stay, have I in my country."

Thus spake the son of his country's betrayer, and fervently folded his hands.

The moon had shifted its radiance away from the grave, and the dead face it had illumined now lay in shadow. It was scarcely possible to distinguish it from the surrounding earth.

"The time has come," he said, and looked round him.

In the east glimmered the first rosy streak of dawn. A bluish haze suffused the landscape, and above him in the branches began the dreamy twitter of awakening birds. He was in the act of throwing the flowers into the grave, when suddenly he changed his mind, and with a frown cast them aside.

"What need of such fastidious effeminacy?" he asked himself rebukingly.

"Dust has no reason to fear meeting dust."