The Devil's Garden by W. B. Maxwell

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Dale shrugged his shoulders, held his head high, and grunted fiercely.
But when he was abreast of the rocks, this imagined voice seemed to
speak to him again.

"You and I have drawn so near together that there's only one
difference now--that you are alive and I am dead. But even that
difference will be gone soon."

And Dale, walking on rather slower than before, made an odd gesture of
his left hand, a wave of hand and arm together, as of a dignified
well-to-do citizen waving off some impudent mendicant: seeming to say,
"Be damned to you. Just you lie quiet where I put you, and don't
worry. I decline to have anything to do with you, or to allow the
slightest communication between us. I simply don't recognize you--nor
will I ever admit again that I see the faintest resemblance. If I
wished, I could explain why. Only I shan't condescend to do
so--certainly not to _you_."

Out of the big ride he went into one of the narrower cuts, and
followed it until he came to the woodside boundary of the Barradine
Orphanage. This was where Mavis had stood looking at it years ago,
when the building was in course of construction. The wooden fence that
she had thought so stiff and ugly then was all weak and old, green and
moss-covered, completely broken down in many places. Inside, the
privet hedge had grown broad and thick; and this barrier, although
any one could easily thrust himself through it, was evidently
considered sufficient, since no trouble had been taken to repair the
outer fence. Indeed, what protective barriers could be needed for such
an enclosure? It contained no money or other kind of treasure; and
who, however base, would attack or in any way threaten a lot of
children?

Dale looked at the top of the belfry tower and the roof of the central
block, and thought of it as a temple of youth, a sacred place
dedicated to the worship of tender and innocent life. He moved through
the trees and found a point where, on higher ground, he could look
across into the garden and see a part of the terrace and verandas.
None of the girls was visible. They had been gathered into those
hospitable walls for the night.

Presently he thought he heard them singing. Yes, that was an evening
hymn. The girls were thanking God for the long daylight of a summer's
day, before they lay down to rest, to sleep, to forget they were alive
till God's sun rose again.

And Dale began once more to think of God. To-night he would not fly
from the sound of the girls' voices. All that reluctance and distaste
was over and done with; it belonged to the time when he was still
struggling against the inevitable drift of his inclinations. Now he
had passed to a state of mind that nothing external could really
affect.

"The finger of God"--Yes, those were unforgivable words. He stretched
himself at full length upon the ground, leaned his head on his elbow,
and lay musing.

He taxed his imagination in order to give himself a concept of what
such a tremendous figure of speech should in truth convey. One said
finger, of course, because one wished to imply that no effort was
used, scarcely any of the divine force drawn upon--just as one says of
a man, he did so-and-so with a turn of the wrist, that is, quite
easily, without putting his back into it. Yes, he thought, that's
about right. Then to make up something for an instance, just to spread
the idea as big as it ought properly to be, one might say that once
upon a time God gave our sun and all the other suns the slightest push
with His finger, _and they haven't done moving yet_.

And it seemed to him that, look where one pleased, one could see the
real work of the finger of God. It had been giving him, William Dale,
faint imperceptible pushes for fifteen years, and see now at the end
where it had pushed him. First it had pushed him upward, higher and
higher, to a position of conspicuous pride, to the topmost summit of a
fair mountain, where he could look round and say, "I have all that I
pined for. This is the world's castle, and I am the king of the
castle." Then it had begun to push him down the other side of this
mountain, the dark side, the side that was always in shadow, downward
and still downward to the miasmic unhealthy plain where all was
rankness, downward to the level of corruption and death. Yes, it had
brought him, the bold, proud law-maker, down and down till he stood no
higher than the victim of his law.

He remembered the common phrase--so often employed by
himself--comparing mice with men. Am I a man or a mouse? And it seemed
that no cat had ever played with a mouse as the Infinite Ruling Power
of the universe had been playing with the man William Dale. He had
been allowed to break loose, to frisk and jump, to fancy he was free
to run right round the earth if he wished to do so; and all the while
he had truly been a prisoner, the helpless prey of his captor, held
close to the place of ultimate doom.

If he had been promptly convicted and hanged, it would have been no
punishment at all compared with what was happening now. The long delay
was the essential part of the punishment, and of the lesson. The fact
that no one suspected his crime had given him the period of agonized
suspense, with all those dream-torments, the fear of death which was
worse than death itself.

He thought of all the things that had appeared to be blind chances but
were really stern decrees. The true function of the money that came
from the dead man's hand was to keep him always on the rack of memory.
And with the aid of the money he had been made to move a little nearer
to the site of his crime. He had been made to buy Bates' business so
that he might dwell right up against Hadleigh Wood, see it every day
from his windows, hear it whispering to him every night when he was
not asleep and dreaming of it. But for that apparently lucky chance of
Mr. Bates' retirement, he would have gone to some splendid new
country, and severing ties of locality, would have shattered
associations of ideas, and been _able to forget_. He had made up his
mind to go to one of the Australian colonies and make a fresh start
there. But that didn't match with God's intentions by any manner of
means.

His thoughts returned to Norah, and here again--here more plainly
than anywhere else--he saw the work of God. It was wonderful and
awe-inspiring how God had selected the instrument that should destroy
him. He felt that he could have resisted the charms of any other girl
in the world except this one. In mysterious ways Norah's fascination
was potent over him, while it might have been quite feeble in its
effects with regard to other men. But for Dale she represented the
solid embodiment of imagined seductiveness, allurement, supreme
feminine charm; that flicker of wild blood in her was to him an
essential attraction, and it linked itself inexplicably with the
amorous reveries of far-off days when, young and free and wild
himself, he loved the woodland glades instead of hating them.

The selected instrument--Yes, she was the one girl on earth who could
have been safely employed to achieve God's double purpose of
overwhelming him with base passion and bringing his lesson home to him
simultaneously. No other girl that ever was born could have aroused
such desire in him, and yet have slipped unscathed out of his arms at
the very moment when the consummation of his sin seemed unavoidable.
Any other girl must herself have been sacrificed in destroying him;
only the child who had frightened him in the wood could
instantaneously, by a few unconsidered words, have taken all the fire
out of him and changed his heart to a lump of ice. That was a stroke
of the Master: most Godlike in its care for the innocent and its
confusion of the guilty.

He remembered how grievously he had dreaded this child--the little
black-haired elf that had seen him hiding. It had made him shiver to
think of her--the small woodland demon, the devil's spy whose lisping
treble might be distinct and loud enough to utter his death sentence.
A thousand times he had wondered about her--thinking: "She is growing
up. She belongs here;" looking in the faces of cottagers' children and
asking himself: "Are you she? Or you? Or you?" Then he had left off
thinking about her.

She had come into his life again, into his very home, and he had never
once asked himself: "Is Norah she?" No, because God would not allow
him to do so; it had suited God's purpose to paralyze the outlet of
all natural thought in that direction. So she grew tall and strong
under his eyes--the dreaded imp of the wood eating his food, squatting
at his own fireside; changing into the imagined nymph of the wood that
he had seen only in dreams; becoming the very spirit of the wood--yes,
the wood's avenging spirit.

He moved from his recumbent position, sat up, and drew out Norah's
letter from the breast pocket of his jacket. He read her letter again,
and his sadness and despair deepened. There was no revolt now; he felt
nothing but black misery. He thought: "I used to fear that she would
be the means of my death, and now death is coming from her. This
letter is my death-warrant."

There was no other way out of his troubles. Life had become
unendurable; he could not go on with it. And this thought became now a
fixed determination. He must copy the example of other and better men;
he must do for himself, as old Bates and many others had done for
themselves when they found their lives too hard for them.

If he didn't--oh, the whole thing was hopeless. Suppose that he
rebelled against this cruel necessity. No, he saw too plainly the
torment that would lie before him--disgrace, grief of wife and
children, soon all the world wishing him dead. And no joy. The girl
would be taken from him. The world--or God--would never allow him to
hide and be happy with her.

Suppose he were to carry her off to the Colonies, and attempt to begin
the new life that he had planned fifteen years ago. Impossible--he was
too old; nearly all his strength had gone from him; the mere idea of
fighting his way uphill again filled him with a sick fatigue. And the
girl, when she saw him failing, physically and mentally, would desert
him. _Her_ love could not last--it was too unnatural; and when,
contrasting him with other men, she saw that he was feeble, exhausted,
utterly worn out, she would shake off the bondage of his
companionship. No, there was no possible hope for the future of such a
union.

He thought: "Other men at fifty are often hale and hearty, chock-full
of vigor. But that's not my case." He felt that, though his frame
remained stout enough, he had exhausted his whole supply of
nerve-force; and this was due not to length of years, but to the pace
at which he had lived them. He thought: "That is what has whacked me
out--the rate I've gone. If I'd been some rich swell treating himself
to a harem of women, horse-racing, gambling at cards; or if I'd been
one of these City gentlemen floating companies, speculating on the
Stock Exchange, and so on; or if I'd been a Parliament man spouting
all night, going round at elections all day, people would have said:
'Oh, what a mighty pity he doesn't give himself a proper chance, but
lives too fast.' Yet those men would all be reposing of themselves
compared with _me_. It stands to reason. It could not be otherwise.
And for why? Because a _murderer_ lives other men's years in one of
his minutes--and the wear and tear on him is more than the Derby
Race-Course, the Houses of Parliament, and the Stock Exchange all
rolled into one crowd would ever feel if they went on exciting
themselves from now to the Day of Judgment."

And again he felt self-pity, but of another kind than that which had
stirred him an hour ago. Now it was clear-sighted, analytical, almost
free from weakness. He thought: "It is a bit rough--it is rather hard,
rather cruel on me, all said and done. For I know that I might have
bin a good man. The good lay in me--it only wanted drawing out." He
remembered the elevating effect of his love for Mavis, how through all
the time of his belief in her purity he had tried to purify himself,
to purge away all the grossness and sensualness that, as he vainly
fancied, made him unworthy to be the mate of so immaculate a creature;
but he was not allowed to continue the purifying process; her horrible
revelation ended it--knocked the sense out of it, made it
preposterously absurd. "If Mavis had been in the beginning what she
has come to be at last, she would have kept me on the highroad to
Heaven." But all the chances had gone against him. "My father failed
me, my mother failed me, my wife failed me."

"The worst faults I had in my prime were conceit and uppishness, but
they only came from my ignorance. They'd have been wiped out of me at
the start, if I'd had the true advantages of education; regular
school training, such as gentlemen's sons enjoy, would have made all
the difference. It's all very well to talk about educating yourself
and rising in the world at the same time, but it can't be done.
There's a season for everything, and the best part of education must
be over before you begin to fight for a position. Otherwise the
handicap is too heavy."

His pity for himself became more poignant; yet still there was nothing
weakening in it, at least nothing that tended to alter his
determination. "No," he thought, "take me all round, I couldn't
originally have bin meant to turn out a wrong un. I've never bin mean
or sneaking or envious in my dealings with other people. I've never
spared myself to give a helping hand to those who treated me decently.
And no one will ever guess the kindly sentiments I entertained for
many other men, or the pleasure I derived the few times I could feel:
'This chap is one I respect, and he seems to like me.' I wanted to be
liked, but the gift o' making myself liked was denied me. Yet, except
for being cast down into sin, I should have got over _that_
difficulty. I was on the right road there too. By enlarging my mind
I'd become more sympathetic. Though always a shy man really and truly,
I was learning to smother the false effects of my shyness."

Thinking thus of his mind, and his long-continued efforts to improve
its powers, he felt: "To go and extinguish all this is an awful thing
to have to do."

Still his determination was not altered. The mystery of that great
pageant, the mental life of William Dale, could not be permitted to
unfold itself any further. It must cease with a snap and a jerk, much
as when the electric current becomes too strong for a small
incandescent lamp and the bulb bursts, the filaments fuse, and all
that the lamp was showing disappears in darkness.

Yes, darkness without a glimmer of hope.

The finger of God--one can't get away from it. If it pushes you toward
the light, then rejoice exceedingly and with a loud voice; if it
pushes you into the dark, then swallow your tongue and go silently. It
seemed to Dale that he comprehended the whole scope and purport of his
doom, and that God's tremendous logic made the justice of his doom
unanswerable. He understood that the law which he had himself set up
was to be binding now. He must execute himself, as he had executed
Everard Barradine. It is for this, the hour of hopelessness and
despair, that God has been waiting. Now it is God's good time. God has
slowly taught him his worthlessness and infamy, so that he may die
despairing.

XXXIII

"Mavis," he said, after supper that evening "I've noticed a branch at
the top of the walnut tree that doesn't look to me too safe. I must
lop that tree first chance I get--or we shall have an accident."

Next morning he was up and dressed before the sun rose, and he came
down-stairs very softly, carrying his boots in his hands, and pausing
now and then to listen. The house was quite silent, with no one
stirring yet except himself. He sat on the lowest step of the stairs
and put on his boots, listened again, then quietly let himself out of
the front door.

On the threshold the cool morning air rushed into his lungs, expanding
them widely, making him draw deep breaths merely for the pleasure of
tasting its freshness and sweetness. The light was still gray and dim,
and the buildings round the yard were vague and shadowy. In the garden
there was a delicious perfume of roses--those most beautiful of all
flowers pouring out their fragrant charms, although their glory of
color had not yet burst forth from the shadows of night.

Moving like a shadow himself, he hurried noiselessly to his work. One
of the shorter ladders would be long enough to reach the lower
branches, and he could climb from them as high as he wished. He
fetched the ladder from the yard, fixed it in position against the
walnut tree, and then went back to the yard for the other things he
wanted.

In the loft where the tools were kept he remained much longer than he
had intended. At first there was scarcely any light at all up here,
and, having stupidly forgotten to bring a box of matches, he had to
grope about fumblingly; but gradually the light improved. He found a
saw, and, attaching it to a light cord, slung it round his neck in the
approved woodman fashion. The saw would be carried merely for the sake
of appearances. Then he hunted for the particular rope that he
required for his purposes, and could not find it. He had seen it two
days ago, neatly rolled, in the corner with other tackle; but now the
corner was all untidy, a confused mass of cordage, and the good new
strong rope was concealing itself beneath weak old rubbish. He knew
that he could trust this rope, because it was the exact fellow of the
one on the pulleys--and with the pulley rope they let down loads that
were a good deal heavier than any man.

Then all at once a ray of light shot through a chink in the boarded
wall, and came like a straight rainbow across the dusty gray floor and
into the corner where he stood stooping. His rope was there right
enough, showing itself conspicuously, seeming to rise on its coils
like a snake and slip its sinuous neck into his hands, so that he had
picked it up and taken it from the corner before he knew what he was
doing.

It was necessary to arrange things with care, but he was a strangely
long time in making his running noose and satisfying himself that it
could not possibly give way or anyhow fail. He was also slow in making
a stop-knot at the part of the rope that he proposed to attach to the
tree, and he felt an extraordinary obtuseness of intelligence while
making the calculations that he had so many times thought out during
the night. "Yes," he said to himself, "twice the length of my arms.
That's quite right. Six feet is twice the length of my arms--but I'll
try it again. Yes--quite all right. Must be. That's a six foot drop.
That's what I decided--a six foot drop. The rope'll stand that. But it
mightn't stand more. An' less than six feet mightn't be enough either.
Yes, that's right."

Then he thought: "I am wasting time." He was conscious of an
imperative necessity for speed and a great danger in acting too
hurriedly; and a queer idea came to him that while in this loft he had
been having a series of cataleptic fits--sudden blanknesses, total
arrests of volition if not of consciousness, during which he had stood
still, listening or staring, but not doing anything to the rope.

He came down from the loft, and in the doorway below a flood of bright
sunlight dazzled him. The sun had risen, Some of Mavis' pigeons were
cooing gently on the granary roof, a horse in the stables began to
whinny, and two of the men came whistling round the outer barn into
the yard.

"Good mornin', sir."

"Good morning."

"Another nice day we are goin' to 'aarve, sir."

"Yes, looks like it."

Seeing his rope and saw, the men asked if there was a job on hand in
which they were to help; but he told them "No." He was only going to
take down a small branch out of the walnut tree, and he could do it
without any assistance.

Then the men went into the stables, and Dale passed through the
kitchen garden to the back of the house. Beneath the walnut tree he
slung the coiled rope over one shoulder and under the other arm; and
then he slowly ascended the ladder, saying to himself: "I am on the
steps of my scaffold. The scaffold steps. I am going up the scaffold
steps." From the top of the ladder he got upon a branch, and, putting
his arms about the stem, began to climb. "Yes," he said to himself,
"my gallows tree. I am going up the gallows tree. This is my gallows
tree;" and he climbed nimbly and firmly.

The green leaves were all round him, a green tent with pretty
loopholes through which he could take peeps at the home that was on
the point of vanishing forever from his eyes. He paused on a level
with the broad eaves, and looked through between branches at a window
on the first floor landing. The casements stood wide open; the square
of glass glittered; the muslin curtains just stirred, trembled
whitely. Far down below his feet were the flagged pathway, the wooden
bench, and three shining milk-pans.

He climbed higher; and it seemed to him that from the moment he left
the ground till now he had been like a drowsy man shaking off his
sloth, like a drugged man recovering consciousness, like a man who was
supposed to be dead rapidly coming to life again. With every inch
added to the height from the ground, he felt stronger, more active,
fuller of nervous and muscular energy. His fingers gripped each branch
as firmly as if they had been iron clamps; his feet, encumbered by
the stout boots, seemed to catch hold and cling to the slightest
irregularities of the smooth bark as skilfully and tenaciously as if
they had been the prehensile paws of a cat; not a touch of vertigo
troubled him; he felt as fearless and splendidly alive as when he
climbed tall trees for buzzards' eggs thirty-three years ago.

Soon he had climbed so high that he knew it would not be safe to climb
higher. He must stop here. At this point the main stem was still thick
enough to take the shock that in a minute he would give it. Above this
point it might not stand the strain. Besides, this was high enough for
appearances. He was within reach of the branch that had some decayed
wood at the top of it. Sitting astride a branch close to the stem, he
adjusted and fixed his rope, binding it round and round the stem and
over and under the branch, reefing it, making it taut and trim so that
no strain could loosen it; and all the while he was conscious of the
power in his arms and hands, the volume of air in his lungs, the flow
of blood in his veins, the nervous force bracing and hardening his
muscles. The rope was fast now. Now he assured himself that its free
length--the part from the tree to the noose--was absolutely correct as
to its amount. Nothing remained to do, nothing but to stand upon the
branch, fix the noose round his neck, and step off into the air.

Lightly and easily he changed his position, stood upon the branch,
holding the stem with his left hand, the noose with his right; and the
life in him pulsed and throbbed with furious strength. It tingled
through and through him, filled him as if he had been a battery
overstored with electricity, shot out at his extremities in lightning
flashes.

In this final position his head had emerged into a leafless space, so
that he could see in all directions; could look down at the house, at
that open window, the kitchen door, and the flagged path; could look
at the barn roofs, the rick-yard, the beehives; could look at his
fields, where the grass lay drying; or could look away at woodland, at
heath, at distant hill. He paused purposely to give himself one last
look round at all he was leaving.

Yes, here was the world--the bitterly sweet world, smiling once more
as it wakes from sleep. Looking down at it he felt an agony of regret.
How intolerably cruel his doom. Why should he of all mortals have been
made to suffer so? But God's law--his own law. Mentally he was
obeying, but physically he was in fierce revolt. Every fiber of him,
every drop of blood, every minute nerve-cell was crying out against
the execution.

The sunlight flowed across the fields in golden waves, the colors of
the flowers sprang out, the soft cool air was like a supremely
magnificent wine that could give old nerveless men the strength of
young giants; and the very marrow of his bones seemed to shrink and
scream for mercy. "Ought to 'a' done it at night," he said to himself.
"Mr. Bates didn't wait till daylight. In the dark--that's it. At the
prisons they give you a bonnet--extinguishing cap; high walls all
round you too; and they do it at the double quick--hoicked out of your
cell and pinioned in one movement, bundled through the shed, and begun
to dance before you can think. Darkness, the sound of a bell, and the
chaplain's whisper, 'Merciful Lord, receive this sinner.' And I've
heard say they stupefy 'em first, make 'em so drunk they don't know
where they are while they shove 'em into nowhere.... Very easy
compared with this set-out;" and he groaned. "O God, you've fairly put
top weight on me--and no mistake."

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