Just here it was that he had seen her first when on a
summer holiday he had lodged with a couple of friends in the farmhouse
towards which his way now lay. She was coming up the hill with the
late sunset gilding her face, and, breathing quickly from the ascent,
had leaned on the wall close by with a smile and a glance for the
young man. She had sat to him, and the autumn brought the sequel to
the summer in his marriage. He had bought from her uncle the little
farmhouse where he had lodged, adding to its modest accommodation a
studio and a bedroom above it, and there he had seen the flicker of
what had never been love, die out, and over the cold ashes of its
embers the poisonous lichen of hatred spread fast. Early in their
married life she had taken to drink, and had sunk into a degradation of
soul and body that seemed bottomless, dragging him with her, down and
down, in the grip of a force that was hardly human in its malignity. Often during the wretched years that followed he had tried to leave
her; he had offered to settle the farm on her and make adequate
provision for her, but she had clung to the possession of him, not,
it would seem, from any affection for him, but for a reason exactly
opposite, namely, that her hatred of him fed and glutted itself on the
sight of his ruin. It was as if, in obedience to some hellish power,
she set herself to spoil his life, his powers, his possibilities, by
tying him to herself. And by the aid of that power, so sometimes he had
thought, she enforced her will on him, for, plan as he might to cut the
whole dreadful business and leave the wreck behind him, he had never
been able to consolidate his resolve into action. There, but a few
miles away, was the station from which ran the train that would bear
him out of this ancient western kingdom, where the beliefs in spells
and superstitions grew rank as the herbage in that soft enervating air,
and set him in the dry hard light of cities. The way lay open, but he
could not take it; something unseen and potent, of grim inflexibility,
held him back.... He had passed no one on his way here, and satisfied now that in the
darkness he could proceed without fear of being recognised if a chance
wayfarer came from the direction in which he was going, he left the
shelter of the hedge, and struck out into the stormy sea of that
stupendous gale. Even as a man in the grip of imminent death sees his
past life spread itself out in front of him for his final survey before
the book is closed, so now, on the brink of the new life from which the
deed on which he was determined alone separated him, John Aylsford, as
he battled his advance through this great tempest, turned over page
after page of his own wretched chronicles, feeling already strangely
detached from them; it was as if he read the sordid and enslaved annals
of another, wondering at them, half-pitying, half-despising him who had
allowed himself to be bound so long in this ruinous noose. Yes; it had been just that, a noose drawn ever tighter round his neck,
while he choked and struggled all unavailingly. But there was another
noose which should very soon now be drawn rapidly and finally tight,
and the drawing of that in his own strong hands would free him. As he
dwelt on that for a moment, his fingers stroked and patted the hank of
whipcord that lay white and tough in his pocket. A noose, a knot drawn
quickly taut, and he would have paid her back with justice and swifter
mercy for the long strangling which he had suffered. Voluntarily and eagerly at the beginning had he allowed her to slip the
noose about him, for Ellen Trenair’s beauty in those days, so long past
and so everlastingly regretted, had been enough to ensnare a man. He
had been warned at the time, by hint and half-spoken suggestion, that
it was ill for a man to mate with a girl of that dark and ill-famed
family, or for a woman to wed a boy in whose veins ran the blood of
Jonas Trenair, once Methodist preacher, who learned on one All-Hallows’
Eve a darker gospel than he had ever preached before. What had happened
to the girls who had married into that dwindling family, now all
but extinct? One, before her marriage was a year old, had gone off
her head, and now, a withered and ancient crone, mowed and gibbered
about the streets of the village, picking garbage from the gutter and
munching it in her toothless jaws. Another, Ellen’s own mother, had
been found hanging from the banister of her stairs, stark and grim. Then there was young Frank Pencarris, who had wed Ellen’s sister. He had sunk into an awful melancholy, and sat tracing on sheets of
paper the visions that beset his eyes, headless shapes, and foaming
mouths, and the images of the spawn of hell.... John Aylsford, in those
early days, had laughed to scorn these old-wife tales of spells and
sorceries: they belonged to ages long past, whereas fair Ellen Trenair
was of the lovely present, and had lit desire in his heart which she
alone could assuage. He had no use, in the brightness of her eye, for
such shadows and superstitions; her beams dispelled them. Bitter and black as midnight had his enlightenment been, darkening
through dubious dusks till the mirk of the pit itself enveloped him. His laughter at the notion that in this twentieth century spells and
sorceries could survive, grew silent on his lips. He had seen the
cattle of a neighbour who had offended one whom it was wiser not to
cross, dwindle and pine, though there were rich pastures for their
grazing, till the rib-bones stuck out like the timbers of stranded
wrecks. He had seen the spring on another farm run dry at lambing-time
because the owner, sceptic like himself, had refused that bounty, which
all prudent folk paid to the wizard of Mareuth, who, like Ellen, was of
the blood of Jonas Trenair. From scorn and laughter he had wavered to
an uneasy wonder, and from wonder his mind had passed to the conviction
that there were powers occult and terrible which strove in darkness and
prevailed, secrets and spells that could send disease on man and beast,
dark incantations, known to few, which could maim and cripple, and of
these few his wife was one. His reason revolted, but some conviction,
deeper than reason, held its own. To such a view it seemed that the
deed he contemplated was no crime, but rather an act of obedience to
the ordinance “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” And the sense of
detachment was over that, even as over the memories that oozed up in
his mind. Somebody--not he--who had planned everything very carefully
was in the next hour going to put an end to his bondage. So the years had passed, he floundering ever deeper in the slough into
which he was plunged, out of which while she lived he could never
emerge. For the last year, she, wearying of his perpetual presence at
the farm, had allowed him to take a lodging in the village.