The Watersplash (18 page)

Annie Jackson made no reply. She had been a little way ahead. Now she was gone, running quickly and lightly along the path which led to the back door.

Miss Silver stood where she was and waited until a gleam of light through the shrubbery informed her that the door had been opened to let Annie in. She went on waiting until she heard it close behind her. It was then, and not until then, that she was aware of what seemed at first to be just a vibration on the air, but which, as it swelled, she recognized to be the sound of organ music coming from the church. With one of those quick decisions which sometimes made her actions unpredictable she turned from the house and took her way along the churchyard path to the side door of the church. She was, in fact, doing just what Mildred Blake had done when she left the Vicarage work-party on the night of William Jackson’s death. Like her she tried the door, found it unlocked, and passed quietly within. As she did so the music sounded in the empty place like the rolling of drums, the crashing of a stormy tide, the sound of wind, and the sound of thunder.

Miss Silver recognized this music. It was the Dies Irae. “Day of wrath, day of mourning”—with its picture of the Last Judgment—heaven and earth consumed in the burning wrath of the Judge. But she had never heard it played like this before. If it was Arnold Random who was playing, there must be something behind that grey, controlled façade. She did not count herself to be musical, but she could recognize that here was a musician, and, what mattered a good deal more, someone in an extremity of pain.

She came forward until she was level with the curtain. It was not quite drawn. Arnold Random sat there in the light. The sweat ran down his ravaged face. He looked like a man in torment, and he played as if he was possessed. She had no plan in her mind. She just stood there and watched him. The storm of sound died down. Very high and soft, a long wailing note came stealing upon the empty silence. Words from the old Latin hymn rose in Miss Silver’s mind—“Recordare, Jesu pie.” Mercy after judgment? There were a few more of those soft mourning notes. Then Arnold Random dropped his hands from the keyboard with a groan. He spoke in a dead voice, as a man may speak to himself when he has come to a place where he can no longer go on.

“It’s too late—”

As he spoke he turned with a kind of groan and saw Miss Silver standing there. She did not speak. They looked at one another. After quite a long time she said,

“You are very unhappy, Mr. Random.”

“Yes—very—”

After another pause she spoke again.

“There is always a right thing to do, as well as a wrong one.”

His hands had fallen upon his knees. He lifted one of them now and let it fall again.

“It is too late—”

“I do not believe it. We may not see the whole of the way, but it is always possible to take the first step.”

Afterwards he was to look back upon this conversation and wonder how it had come about. He had been in extremity. His sleep had gone from him. He had thoughts which he could no longer control, and from which there was no escape. He saw himself slipping with an ever increasing velocity into an abyss of loneliness and shame. And just when the whole nightmare had reached its unendurable climax, there was, as it were, a gleam from the daylight world which he had lost. And with this gleam a sense of assurance, of calm authority, a sense of goodness. He had known the presence of evil and been tortured by it. Now he knew the presence of good. It did not matter to him that it was a stranger who laid this tranquilizing touch upon the fever of his thoughts. If you are dying of thirst, it does not matter to you that it is a stranger who holds the cup of cool water to your lips.

He looked at her and said in a bewildered voice,

“What am I to do?”

Miss Silver shook her head.

“I cannot tell you that. You will know what it is yourself. It is only the first step which is hard.”

He went on looking at her. In the end he said,

“There are things I must do—I should have done them long ago. Goodbye.”

She said, “Good-night, Mr. Random,” and turned to go.

His voice followed her.

“I don’t know your name. You arc staying with Mrs. Ball, are you not?”

“Yes. My name is Maud Silver.”

He came as far as the door and held it for her to pass out. A streak of light fell from it upon the gravel path and remained there until she had turned the corner of the church.

The old church clock gave out the twelve strokes of a cloudy midnight. As a rule, when Miss Silver had read a psalm or a chapter from the shabby Bible which was her constant companion she would put out the light, arrange her two pillows to her liking, and pass immediately into a state of tranquil repose. Upon the rare occasions when this did not happen it was because her mind was too preoccupied to relax. Tonight her thoughts were very deeply occupied indeed, and not only occupied, but burdened. Annie Jackson’s words stood out among them—“These things go in threes.” Two people had been murdered. Two successive Fridays had seen a victim struck down. Tomorrow it would be Friday again. The Vicarage work-party would assemble, Arnold Random would doubtless come to his practising in the church, and the faint sounds of the organ would steal out across the churchyard and hang in the air above the watersplash.

There might be no reason for the murderer to strike again. There might be a grave and insistent reason. Only the murderer would know. And in murder, as in many other things, it is the first step that is the difficult one. A couple of homely proverbs reinforced this line of thought—“In for a penny, in for a pound,” and, “As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.” And with each step into the dark other world beyond stability, the strength of the motive required would become progressively less, until in the end there might hardly need to be a motive at all. In the unbalanced mind the link between cause and effect may be crazily wrenched, if not altogether broken.

When the church clock struck twelve Miss Silver folded back the bed-clothes and went over to the window. Her room looked towards the churchyard, very deeply covered by the cloudy darkness, very sombre, mysterious and vague, and the black church watching it, its steeple pointing to heaven. The casement window stood partly open. She loosened the catch, pushed it wide, and leaned out. The house was two-storeyed and rambling. One of the windows glowed faintly. The curtains were not drawn. The two leaves of the casement jutted out, and between them the darkness thinned away. She could discern the window-frame, the sill, and those two jutting leaves. She knew the room to be Annie’s.

After some pause for reflection she put on her warm blue dressing-gown with the hand-made crochet trimming which had already completed years of useful service upon its red flannel predecessor, and opening her door, stepped silently into the passage. The landing was not far away, and a faint light burned there. Every step towards Annie Jackson’s room would take her farther away from it, but it would serve. Her feet, in black felt slippers lined with lamb’s wool and adorned by neat blue bows, made no sound on the rather worn carpeting.

Standing before Annie’s door, a hand upon the knob, she heard a deep choking breath, and then a gasping cry, “No— no—no!”

Before the third “No!” was uttered she was in the room and the door shut behind her. She wanted neither Ruth nor the Vicar to be a witness to what might be going to take place between herself and Annie Jackson. The glow which she had seen from her window proceeded from an old-fashioned night-light stuck on a saucer and set very prudently in the basin upon Annie’s washstand. There was even a little water in the basin. Miss Lucy Wayne had evidently trained her maidservants well.

The light slanting up out of the basin threw all the shadows high. The bed, an old-fashioned single four-poster, was bare of the curtains for which it had been designed. The posts, and the rods which connected them, stood up stark like the bars of a cage. And in the middle of the bed Annie sat up straight, her hands clasped to her breast, her eyes wide, and fixed, and sightless. She was asleep, but not at rest. She walked in a dreadful dream and cried out against it.

Miss Silver stood at the bed foot and watched her. There was sweat on the face. The hair was pushed back in a disordered tangle. The mark of the bruise showed plain. She was speaking now in a rapid mutter where the words were lost. Hurry and fear, hurry and fear—they rode her, and needed no words to make themselves plain.

And then the words began to come through.

“Dark—dark—dark—” The voice was no more than a whisper at the first, but it rose to a thin trembling scream. And then the muttering—

Miss Silver made no move. She stood and watched.

Slowly and painfully, words were thrown up.

“Dark… In dark—of night—” Then, with a convulsive shudder, “Dreadful—sin—dreadful—dreadful sin—”

Somewhere in Annie Jackson’s mind there walked the ghost of Christopher Hale, drowned in the watersplash more than a hundred years ago. The words which came from her on those difficult gasping breaths were part of the verse which she and Miss Silver had read together upon the tombstone set up by his wife.

In dark of night and dreadful sin

The heart conceives its plan.

Was it really the ghost of Christopher Hale who walked in Annie’s dream, or was it the ghost of William Jackson?

Miss Silver leaned forward from where she stood at the foot of the bed and said,

“Annie!”

There was a change at once. The hands which had been clenched at the thin chest were flung out as if to ward a blow.

“I didn’t tell—I didn’t—I didn’t! No one can say I did! There isn’t no one can say I was there! There isn’t no one—” On the last word her voice faltered and dropped. Her hands dropped too. She looked about her as if she had waked in a strange place—wardrobe on the right—chest of drawers and washstand on the left, with the jug lifted out of the basin and the night-light burning.

Her troubled gaze came to rest upon Miss Silver in her blue dressing-gown, her hair very neatly controlled by the strong brown net which she wore at night.

“What—is it?”

“You have had a bad dream. You cried out.”

Annie closed her eyes. The dream still lay behind them.

“It won’t let me be—” The tears began to run down over her pinched face. “It won’t let me be. Soon as ever I lie down it’s there again. I dursn’t go to sleep but I’m down there in the dark—and the water drowning him.” Her eyes flew open suddenly. “I didn’t say it—oh—I didn’t say it!”

Miss Silver came round to the side of the bed. She sat down there.

“Annie, won’t you tell me what happened on the night your husband was drowned? If you did, I think that the dream would go away, and that you would not be troubled with it again.”

Annie stared at her with dilated eyes.

“And have them—hang me?” she said.

Miss Silver took one of the bony hands.

“Have you done anything for which they could hang you?”

The hand jerked in hers. The whole frail body jerked.

“And who’s going to believe I didn’t? Who’s going to believe me against them whose word ’ud be taken afore mine? If my Miss Lucy was here she’d speak for me. Twenty-four years is a long time to be living with anyone, and you’d know they wasn’t the kind to do murder. But she’s gone—and there’s no one now. They’d find out about the girl in Embank—and how I said I wished I was dead before I married him. And they’d see how he bruised me. It didn’t show so much at first—but they couldn’t help but see it now—not if they looked. And they’ll think I did it!”

“And did you do it, Annie?”

She was holding the hand in a firm but gentle clasp. This time there was no jerk. It closed a little upon hers and was still. Annie looked at her and said,

“Oh, no, miss. I’ve wished myself dead many’s the time— but not him.”

“But you went to the watersplash the night that he was drowned?”

Annie took a heavy sobbing breath.

“I’ve gone there most nights lately come closing time—to see if he was coming home. Sometimes he’d come—and sometimes he wouldn’t. Then I’d know he’d gone off to that girl.”

“You went every night?”

“Mostly. Mr. Edward could have told them that—if he’d a mind. There’s a two or three times he’s gone by me—walking quick—coming back from Mr. Barr’s he’d be—and he’d go past me and say good-night. He might have spoke of it—but he wouldn’t want to get me into trouble.”

After the loneliness, the coldness, and the dark secret on her heart, Annie was feeling a quite extraordinary sense of relief. There was an easing of her whole mind and body. The words which had come with so much effort now flowed like water. In some strange unreasoning way she recognized the presence of kindness and authority and responded to them.

Miss Silver held her hand and said gently,

“Then you went down to the splash on the night your husband was drowned—”

Annie repeated the words in an uncertain voice.

“I—went—down—”

“What time was it?”

“It was—getting on—for ten—”

“Did you see Mr. Edward Random?”

“He’d gone past me—just before I come to the splash.”

“Where was he when you came to it?”

“He was going up the slope—and William was coming down. They said a word or two, and I heard him call out, ‘Goodnight, Willy.’ They’d known each other from boys.”

“What happened after that?”

“I went back—up the other side of the rise. I didn’t want William—to see me. I waited to hear him—come over the splash—” She gave a sudden violent shudder. “But he never.”

“Why?”

The answer came in a shaking whisper.

“He was done in—”

“By whom?”

Annie’s eyes met hers in a fixed stare. The flow of words had stopped. Fear had come down and cut them off like the closing of a dam.

“Annie, what did you see, or hear?”

She just stared.

“Did you go down to the splash again?”

“When—he—didn’t come—” The stumbling answer was so faint that it was hardly to be heard.

“And then?”

“He—came—”

“Yes, Annie?”

She pulled away her hand with great suddenness.

“I went away home. Do you think I wanted him to catch me? I ran most part of the way. I see them come down the rise, and I ran for it.”

Miss Silver picked out a single word and presented it with gravity.

“Them?”

The breath caught in Annie’s throat.

“What do you think I’m going to say—that there was someone coming down there after him? It was dark, wasn’t it? How could I see in the dark? And if I could, what do you think I’m going to do—put up my word against them that would set their hand on the Bible and swear they saw me push William in? And stand by and see me hanged—and never lose a good night’s sleep over it neither! Who’s going to credit my word against them that would do that? Not if I was to take my Bible oath that I ran home the fastest I could go!”

“Why did you do that?”

Annie was sobbing, a hand at her throat. Her words came out between the sobs.

“I thought—he’d have—my life. He was drunk—and he was angry. I could hear him—talking—to himself. ‘I’ll get it out of him!’ he said—and a lot of bad words—and, ‘I’ll be even with him!’ And I didn’t wait to hear no more—I took and ran.”

There was a pause. Faint steady light in the room, and a soft air coming in from the mild November night. Miss Silver said,

“Someone was following your husband?”

There was a slight movement of the bruised head.

“Who was it?”

Annie caught her breath painfully.

“It—was—dark—”

“Shall I tell you who it was?”

The sobs ceased. The troubled breathing ceased. Everything seemed to wait and listen.

Miss Silver leaned forward and spoke a name.