The Devil's Garden by W. B. Maxwell

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But he would have done it if he had not heard his daughter's voice.

Rachel had come to the open window, and she uttered a frightened cry
at sight of him perched high in the tree.

"Oh, dads, do take care!"

Next moment her mother came to the window; and they stood side by
side, each with a hand to her eyes, watching him in the same attitude
of anxiety.

"Don't speak to him," whispered Mavis; and Dale heard the whisper as
clearly as if it had been close against his ear.

He could not do it before them. He had been too slow about it; he
could not darken their lives with the visible horror of it. And it
seemed to him that he had not sufficiently thought of its effect upon
them. The whole thing had been clumsily planned. Just at first, when
he was found hanging dead with the saw dangling from his neck, it
might have been believed that he had slipped and fallen, and hanged
himself by accident; but afterward all would have known that it was
suicide. The truth would have been betrayed by the running noose, by
recollections of Mr. Bates, and by everybody's knowledge of an ancient
local custom.

"All right," he said. "Don't alarm yourselves, my dears. I must give
this job up, Mavis. I can't quite reach where I wanted to."

"Mind how you come down," said Mavis. "Do come down carefully."

"Yes, dads," said Rachel, "do _please_ come down carefully."

He climbed down slowly, feeling no joy in his respite, saying to
himself: "I must think of some other way. I must finish with the
hay-making, get the rick complete, and clear up everything in the
office--so's at least poor Mav'll find things all ship-shape when she
has to take over and manage without me. My hurry to get it through was
selfishness; for, after all, I've best part of three weeks to do it
in. The on'y real necessity is to have it done before Norah comes
home."

And again he thought of the finger of God. This clumsy hurried
execution had been refused by God. He was being pushed away, so that
the last glimpse of his eyes should not see the pleasant picture of
home.

He must do it privately, secretly, in a lonely spot; and he must spare
no pains, must plot and scheme till he contrived all the convincing
details of a likely accident. That was how he had killed Everard
Barradine; and he must arrange matters similarly for himself.

XXXIV

Two or three days passed. The busy yet peaceful life of home and
fields was going on; the hay had been carried; the rick was made, and
the rick-sheet covered a handsome pile.

Dale worked hard, quite in his old untiring way, and seemed just his
natural self; but truly he was mentally detached from the surrounding
scene. For the second time in his life, and to a greater extent than
the first time, he was subjugated and controlled by one dominant idea.
Throughout each day all things around him were dreamlike and
unsubstantial, and he performed many actions as automatically as if he
had been a somnambulist. He walked and talked or rode on the shaft of
a wagon without in the least troubling to think what he was doing, and
every time his thought became active it seemed to spring into vigor
again merely to obey the prompting of the inner voice that now
governed him.

Thus while sitting on the wagon shaft he thought: "If I pitched myself
off and let the wheels go over me, that would be _likely_, just the
accident that fools are always making, but it wouldn't fulfil the
other conditions that have been laid on me. Also it might fail. I
might only mess myself up, and not quite kill myself."

Half an hour afterward, as he walked beside the empty wagon back to
his hay fields, he was still hammering away at the dominant idea.

A gun and a hedge--no accident can be more common than that. Say you
want to shoot some rats that have been showing their ugly whiskers in
the field ditches; take your gun, well charged, and blow your brains
out among the brambles of an untrimmed hedge.

Or these motor-cars! He thought of the way they came racing down the
highroad from Old Manninglea. How would it be to wait for one of these
buzzing, crashing, stinking road monsters over there on the edge of
the heath, and jump out just in front of it? If one stooped down and
took the full shock on one's forehead, it would mean a mess that there
would be no patching together again. But one could not attempt that in
daylight, because the driver would jam the breaks on, swerve round
one, do anything desperate rather than run into one. And if he could
not avoid one, he would tell everybody at the inquest that it was a
plain suicide and nothing else. There would be passengers in the car
too, who would also swear to its being a suicide. And at night these
traveling cars have such powerful head-lamps that the roadway is
lighted up for a hundred yards in front of them. Even at night, they
would recognize it as suicide.

Toward dusk every evening external things became more real, and his
hold on life tightening, he suffered more acutely in each hour that
passed. Night after night he went back to Hadleigh Wood. It was the
wood of despair, the focal point of all his pain, and he was drawn to
it irresistibly through the gathering darkness.

On the second evening he found it difficult to get away. Mavis
stopped him, asked him some domestic question, and then began to talk
about a new suit of clothes for their boy. He was alive again now,
emerged from his somnambulistic state, and he gave full attention to
this matter of Billy's new serge suit; nevertheless, all at once she
apologized for troubling him, and inquired if he had anything on his
mind.

"No, Mav, of course not."

"Are you sure, Will? Do tell me if you've something worrying you."

"What should I have to worry me?" and he put his arm round her ample
waist, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

"The hay's all right, isn't it?"

"Yes, everything is all right.... You can't do better than you've
suggested about Billy. Take him with you to Manninglea--and, look
here, if Mr. Jones can't fit him properly out of stock, let him make
the suit to measure. Don't consider the extra expense. We can afford
it."

"Thank you, Will." Mavis was delighted. "You've told me to do the very
thing I wanted to do; but of course I'd never have done it without
your authority. I've been longing to see the little chap in clothes
regularly cut out and finished for him, and nobody else."

Going through the yard Dale was stopped by his men. The foreman wanted
directions for to-morrow's work; the carter asked for three new tires;
the stableman regretted to be compelled to report that one of the
horses had broken his manger rack.

As he finally came out on the road, Dale was thinking, "Soon now I
shall be gone, but everything here will be just the same. They will
all of them find that they can do very well without me: the men, the
children, Mavis--yes, even Norah. Mavis will be the one who will
grieve for me. Norah will suffer most, but it will be only for a
little while. She'll take another sweetheart--a real sweetheart this
time, and she'll marry, and give birth to babies; and it will be to
her as if I had died a hundred years ago, as if I had never lived at
all, as if I'd been somebody she'd read of in a story-book, or
somebody she'd dreamed about in one of those silly nasty sort of
dreams which young girls can't help having, but are ashamed to
remember and always try to forget."

Mavis, however, would wish to remember him, and be sorry when she
found his image fading. She would struggle to keep it bright and
fresh. She would grieve long and sincerely--and then she would be
quite happy. She wouldn't marry again; she wouldn't do anything
foolish. "No," he thought, "she'll just devote herself to the bairns,
working for them late and early, and managing the business as well as
I have managed it myself. She'll be cheated a bit here and there, as a
woman always is--but, all said and done, she'll do very well without
me. Customers will support her--the word will go round. 'Don't let's
turn our backs on the widow of that poor fellow Dale.'"

And he thought, with a bitterness of heart that almost made him sick,
that perhaps after his death many people might speak well of him; that
certainly in the little world of Vine-Pits Farm and the Cross Road
cottages there would be a natural inclination to exaggerate his few
good qualities and be gentle to his innumerable faults; so that a
sort of legend of virtue would weave itself about his memory, making
him a humble, insignificant, but local saint--to be placed at a
respectful distance and yet not too far from the shrine of that great
and illustrious saint the late Mr. Barradine. "Of course," people
might say, "one was a grand gentleman, and the other only a common
fellow who had raised himself a bit by hard work; but both of 'em were
good kind men, and both no doubt have met with the reward of their
goodness up there in Heaven."

As soon as he got into the wood he hurried as rapidly as he could
toward Kibworth Rocks; and then when he got near them he walked slowly
up and down the ride, with his head bowed and his hands clasped behind
his back. And each evening the same thing happened. Visions of Norah
assailed him; he passed again through the tortures of yearning desire
that he had felt when he first read her letter; and he said to
himself, "If proof was wanted, here's the proof. This would show me,
if I didn't know already, that I must do it."

In imagination he saw her sitting alone on a balk of timber by the
sea. Her hands lay loose in her lap; her neck was bent; her whole
attitude indicated dejection, loneliness, sadness. She was thinking
about him. She was thinking, "How cruel of him not to answer my sad
little letter. He can't be so busy but what he could have found time
to send me a few lines with his own hand. Just half a sheet of paper
would have been enough--with one or two ink crosses at the end, to
show me he prized the kisses that I put in my letter to him. It was
brutal, yes, and cowardly, to make Mrs. Dale write instead. If Mrs.
Dale hadn't written telling me he'd received my letter, I couldn't
have found it in my heart to believe that he'd treat me so abominably
cruel."

And, groaning, he spoke to this mental picture that he had evoked for
his renewed torment. "Norah, my sweet one, I can't help myself.
Commands have been laid upon me. I'm no longer free to do what I
please. Norah, don't look away from me. Turn to your boy--let him see
your dear eyes, though the sight of them makes him bleed." And the
thought-picture obeyed him. He saw the entrancing oval of the face
instead of its delicate profile, looked into the profound beauty of
her eyes, felt that her warm red lips were close in front of him, and
that he would go raving mad if they did not come closer still and let
him kiss them.

After such spasms of burning pain he was temporarily exhausted; he
felt completely emptied of emotional power, as if his nerves had
delivered so fierce a discharge that they must cease from working
until time and repose had allowed them to replenish themselves. Then,
so long as this state lasted, his love for the girl was deprived of
all material for passion; it was as though the highest thinking part
of him had been cut off from the sensational mass, and only the top of
his head served to keep alive his memory of the girl.

Then he thought of her with a fantastic longing that seemed to him
beautiful, immaterial, and innocent. He said to himself, "I don't
shirk my punishment. I'm going to take it. But fair's fair--There's no
occasion to make myself out worse than I really am. Norah has taken
hold of me a great deal more by my int'lect than by the low animal
kind of feelings that are the mark of the abject sinner. I can't live
without her; but if I might live with her, I feel I could be content
to let it all remain quite innocent between us. Yes, I feel I could be
happy with her just as a companion, provided she and I were alone
together, far away from everybody else--yes, I'd take my happiness on
those terms, that she was never to be anything else to me but just
that."

But soon those treacherous nerves restored themselves, the upper and
lower parts of him were all one again, and the diffuse yet darting
pain returned. Anger came too. It seemed that the dead man mocked him,
went on softly laughing at him.

"What a humbug you are"--he gave the dead man words--"what a colossal
humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy,
isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle.
But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not
for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your
humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no better and
no worse than I was. You are exactly the same as me."

And Dale, breaking his own rule, or forgetting in his anger that he
had refused to discuss things with this imaginary voice, answered
wrathfully.

"This girl cares for me--that's the difference between us. She offers
me love. And that's something you never had."

"How do you know?" said the dead man. "Your Mavis was one of many.
And, besides, don't be so sure that Mavis wasn't fond of me. She never
ran away from me. She came when I whistled for her."

Dale brandished his arms wildly, turned round, and stared at the
pine-trees and the bracken. It seemed to him that some imperishable
essence of the man was really here, mingling with the shadows,
floating in the dusky air; and that possibly over there among the
rocks, if one went to look for it, one might see a simulacrum of the
man's bodily shape--perhaps only a gray shadowy outlined form, the
odious stranger of dreams, but more vague than in the dreams,
stretched on his back, holding up his blood-stained boots, and
grinning all over his battered face.

"Yes, perhaps so," said the voice. "But I notice that you don't come
in to look for me. You keep to the ride still. Now you've got so very
close to me, why do you turn shy of the last little bit? Is it that
you wish me to save you trouble by showing myself?"

And Dale made gestures of semi-insane fury, and spoke in a loud,
hoarse voice.

"Yes, show yourself if you want to. You 'aarve my leave. Come out an'
stan' here before me. I'm not afraid of you--now or hereafter."

"Hereafter--hereafter--hereafter." As Dale moved away slowly, the dead
man seemed to mock him, to laugh at him derisively. "Hereafter--yes,
that's a big word. Yes, go and talk that out with God."

He went up one of the narrow tracks that led toward the dead man's
Orphanage, intending to look at it and perhaps hear again the evening
hymn; but before he got to those broken fences he turned and began to
wander aimlessly through the trees. All his mind was now full of the
awful thought of God, and of the eternal punishment to which he
believed God had condemned him.

Christ had tried to save him; but the other two persons of the Holy
Blessed and Glorious Trinity had interposed, had prevented Christ from
holding any further communication with him, and together had issued
the fearful decree. That was it. Christ had not deserted him; he had
lost the right ever to approach Christ again. That accounted for
everything--the unutterable desolation, the dark despair, the
overwhelming necessity of death without one ray of hope.

All that lovely and comforting faith in the endless loving mercy of
God the Son, the Redeemer of mankind, the Friend and sometime Comrade
of man, was to prove useless to him; the gentle creed of the Baptists
could not be applied to so vile a case as his; he was at handygrips
with the dread Jehovah, the mighty Judge, the offended King of
creation.

Three Persons and one God--yes, but such different Persons; and
thinking of the triple mystery, he imagined that two of its component
parts had probably seen through him from the very beginning of his
religious fervor. Only the other part, the part that he wished was the
whole, had believed in him and gone on believing in him until it was
forbidden to do so any more.

The awe and reverence that he felt while he thought in this manner
made him bow his head and keep his eyes humbly downcast, as one not
daring to look upward to the heavenly throne; yet, profound and
sincere as was his reverential awe, he unhesitatingly translated all
the sublime mystery of the skies into the simple terms that alone
possess plain meaning to man's limited intelligence. Nothing in the
naturally courageous bent of his mind prevented him; everything in his
experiences of the Baptists, with their constant habit of homely
illustration, encouraged him to do so.

He imagined the First and the Third Persons of the Trinity seated
royally but vaguely amid the clouds, all about them a splendor of
light like that of sunset or dawn, melodious music faintly
perceptible, exquisitely beautiful forms of angels rising on white
wings, hovering obediently, fading obediently--but they themselves,
the Lords of Life and of Death, the Masters of Time and Space, were
two tangible concrete old men--two venerable wise old men--the
ultimate strained extended conception of two powerful, honored,
high-placed old men. And they talked as men would talk--not in the
human vocabulary, but conveying to each other, _somehow_, human
ideas--about the man William Dale.

It was at the period of his conversion or repentance or baptism, and
they were speaking to each other of Their Beloved Son and His newest
recruit. And God the Father seemed to say that He would hope for the
best--although, as they Both knew, Christ was too easily imposed on.
And God the Holy Ghost pursed His lips, and shook His head, and said,
"Take it from Me, this fellow Dale will turn out badly"--seeming to
add or explain that it was a mere pretense and no true repentance. "He
has _never_ repented of his crime. But of course he is anxious about
his future, and would try any trick to escape the punishment he has
richly deserved."

All this was terribly real to him, and he imagined the dread scene
more strongly every moment. Those Two went on debating his
case--becoming now so solidly presented to his imagination that he
could see Them, the purple color of Their robes, the halo of light as
in a painted window, Their forms, Their faces. God the Father was not
unlike old Mr. Bates, except that He had a long beard and that there
mingled with the candid dignity of His expression a consciousness of
sovereign power. The Holy Ghost was clean-shaven, very thin, with
sharp clearly-cut features as of somebody who does not enjoy robust
health, and with a slight but painful suggestion of a Roman Catholic
priest who habitually goes deep into private secrets and is never
really satisfied until he has extracted the fullest possible
confessions. He was the One that Dale had never so much cared
about--the _difficult_ member of the firm, the sleeping partner who
never really slept, who professed to keep himself in the background,
but who quietly asserted himself in important moments and proved
infinitely the hardest of the Three.

And so it had been in this case. Since time is nothing, and then and
now are all one, Dale imagined that while his Judges talked of him in
Heaven his whole earthly career had flashed onward to its end; so that
he and all that concerned him was disposed of at one continuous
sitting. Thus, without a pause, the Holy Ghost was already saying,
"You see I was right in my first view of the affair. Dale is
disgracing himself again. Now You and I must not allow any further
communication between Our dear Son and such an impostor."

Then Christ pleaded for him, prayed for mercy. Christ, although
invisible, was certainly there, imploring mercy for the man he had
trusted and loved; and, in spite of the fact that He remained unseen,
His mere presence glorified and magnified the heavenly scene. The
light grew softer and yet more supremely radiant; hosts of angels
soared and hovered in vast spaces between the rolling clouds; a
vibrating echo of the divine pity swept like music far and near.

But the Holy Ghost brought forward a large strongly-bound volume,
opened it, and said very quietly, "Let Me show You what We have
against him in the book." And at sight of the book Dale shivered and
grew cold to the core of his spine. He knew perfectly well what was
entered in the book, and he thought, "It stands to reason They could
never get over _that_. I might have known all along _that_ would do
for me, an' there was no getting round it."

"This is his record," the voice of the implacable Judge continued;
"not what I have attributed to him as secret thought, but words taken
down as spoken by his own mouth. Having committed his crime, he had
the calm audacity--_to lay the blame on US_.... Yes, here is the
entry. This is the statement verbatim: 'It is the finger of God'."

And Christ seemed to plead in an agony of grief still strove to
lighten the punishment of the pitiful worm that he had deigned to call
His brother man. "Oh, he didn't mean it."

"He _said_ it," replied the Holy Ghost, dryly.

"But he didn't think what he was saying--he has been sorry for it ever
since."

"Yet, frankly," said the Holy Ghost, "I can not see that he has made
a single effort to put things straight, by removing the blame to the
proper quarter--that is, to himself."

Nevertheless, Christ still pleaded, could not be silenced, must go on
struggling to save this one man--because He was the Savior of all men,
because He was Christ. He was there, certainly, infallibly, although
quite invisible--He was there, kneeling at the feet of the other Two,
praying, weeping:--He was there, filling Heaven with inconsolable woe
because, although His myriad suns shone bright as when He lighted them
and His universe swung steady and true in His measureless void, one
microscopic speck of dirt only just big enough to hold immortal life
was in danger of eternal death.

All these imaginations were absolutely real to Dale, an approximate
conception of the truth which he could not doubt; and he thought:
"Need I wonder if I have not had the slightest glimpse of His face? It
is my doom. Christ is cut off from me. So far as human time counts,
the communication was broken that afternoon when I was seeming to see
him as he rode into Jerusalem and my hankerings after Norah seemed to
snap the thread.

"I was judged at that moment. It was my doom--never more, here or
there, to look upon His face."

XXXV

It was the evening of another day; and Dale stood motionless in the
ride, close to Kibworth Rocks.

The twilight was fading rapidly; clouds that had crept up from the
east filled the sky, and presaged a dark and probably a stormy night.
Every now and then a gust of angry wind shook the tops of the fir
trees; then the air was still and heavy again, and then the wind came
back a little fiercer than before. Dale felt sure that there would be
rain presently, and he thought: "If his ghost is really lying in
there, it'll get as wet as that first night when the showers washed
away all the blood."

He stared and listened, but to-night he could not fancy that he heard
the dead man calling to him. He could not invent any appropriate
conversation. It seemed to him that the ugly phantom was refusing to
talk, that it had become sulky, or that it was pretending not to be
there at all in order to effect a most insidious purpose. Yes, that
must be the explanation. It wanted to entice and lure him off the
ride--to make him venture right in there among the rocks, so that he
might be shown the thing that had haunted him in dreams.

"Very well," said Dale, "so be it. That's the idea. All right. I
agree."

He did not, however, move for another minute or so. He was thinking
hard, and listening eagerly. But he could hear no sound, could
imagine no sound, other than that made by the wind.

Then he moved, and, examining the ground, made his way slowly from the
ride to the rocks, thinking the while, "It's impossible to follow my
exact footsteps, because things have changed--but this was about the
line I took with him."

Forcing himself through a tangle of holly and hawthorn, he came out
into the open space and his feet struck against stone. In front of him
the rocks rose darkly against the waning light, and he began to
clamber about among them, over smooth round surfaces, along narrow
gullies, and by cruel jagged ridges, seeking to find the exact spot
where he had left the dead body. "It was about here," he said, after a
time. "It was close by here. Prob'bly down there, where the foxgloves
and the blackberries have taken root. Anyhow, that's near enough. I've
come as near as I can;" and he sat down upon the ledge just above this
hollow, and looked about him, attentively, in all directions.

The wind had ceased to blow; not a leaf stirred; silence reigned over
the strewn boulders. Downward, where the ground fell away to a deep
chasm, everything was indistinct; to the west, beneath banked masses
of cloud, the last glow of the sunset showed in blood-red bands, and
on this side all the intervening trees were black as ink; all about
him the shadows filled every hollow, and the rocks were like shoals or
reefs above the surface of a stagnant sea.

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