I beat my hands together to promote circulation. I had left my home hurriedly, and had made no provision for the undergoing of such an ordeal as this terrible, unprecedented snow-storm inflicted. In spite of the speed at which I had travelled, my hands and feet were growing numbed, my face smarted with the cold. Heaven help me to decide aright, whether to go on or turn back!
The decision was not left to me. Suddenly, close at hand, I heard a wild peal, a scream of laughter which made my blood run cold. Swift from the whirling, tossing, drifting snow emerged a tall grey figure. It swept past me like the wind; but as it passed me I knew that my quest was ended—that Philippa was found!
She vanished in a second, before the terror which rooted me to the spot had passed away. Then I turned and, fast as I could run, followed her, crying as I went, ‘Philippa! Philippa!’
I soon overtook her; but so dark was the night that I was almost touching her before I saw her shadowy, ghost-like form. I threw my arms round her and held her. She struggled violently in my grasp.
‘Philippa, dearest! It is I, Basil,’ I said, bending close to her ear.
The sound of my voice seemed to calm her, or I should rather say she ceased to struggle.
‘Thank heaven, I have found you!’ I said. ‘Let us get back as soon as possible.’
‘Back! No! Go on! Go on!’ she exclaimed. ‘On, on, on, up the road yet awhile—on through the storm, through the snow—on till you see what I have left behind me! On till you see the wages of sin—the wages of sin!’
Her words came like bullets from a mitrailleuse. Through the night I could see her face gleaming whiter than the snow on her hood. I could see her great, fixed, dark eyes full of nameless horror.
‘Dearest, be calm,’ I said, and strove to take her hands in mine.
As I tried to gain possession of her right hand something fell from it, and, although the road was now coated with snow, a metallic sound rang out as it touched the ground. Mechanically I stooped and picked up the fallen object.
As I did so Philippa with a wild cry wrested herself from the one hand whose numbed grasp still sought to retain her, and, with a frenzied reiteration of the words ‘The wages of sin!’ fled from me, and was lost in the night.
Even as I rushed in pursuit I shuddered as the sense of feeling told me what thing it was I had picked up from the snowy ground. It was a small pistol! Cold as the touch of the metal must have been, it seemed to burn me like a coal of fire. Impulsively, thoughtlessly, as I ran I hurled the weapon from me, far, far away. Why should it have been in Philippa’s hand this night?
I ran madly on, but not for long. My foot caught in a stone, and I fell, half stunned and quite breathless, to the ground. It was some minutes before I recovered myself sufficiently to once more stand erect. Philippa must now have obtained a start which, coupled with her frenzied speed, almost precluded the possibility of my overtaking her.
Moreover, a strange, uncontrollable impulse swayed me. The touch of that deadly weapon still burnt my hand. Philippa’s words still rang in my ears. ‘On, on, on, up the road yet awhile!’ she had cried. What did she mean? What had been done tonight?
I must retrace my steps. I must see! I must know! Philippa is flying through the cold, dark, deadly night; but her frame is but the frame of a woman. She must soon grow exhausted, perhaps sink senseless on the road. Nevertheless, the dreadful fears which are growing in my mind must be set at rest; then I can resume the pursuit. At all cost I must know what has happened!
Once more I turned and faced the storm. Heavens! Anything might happen on such a night as this! I went on and on, flashing my lantern as I went on the centre and on each side of the road. I went some distance past that spot where I judged that Philippa had swept by me. Then suddenly, with a cry of horror, I stopped short. At my very feet, in the middle of the highway, illumined by the disc of light cast by my lantern, lay a whitened mass, and as my eye fell upon it I knew only too well the meaning of Philippa’s wild exclamation—‘The wages of sin! The wages of sin!’
DEAD! Before I knelt beside him and, after unbuttoning his coat, laid my hand on his breast, I knew the man was dead. Before I turned the lantern on his white face I knew who the man was. Sir Mervyn Ferrand had paid for his sin with his life! It needed little professional skill to determine the cause of his death. A bullet fired, it seemed to me, at close quarters had passed absolutely through the heart. He must have fallen without a moan. Killed, I knew, by the hand of the woman he had wronged.
A sneering smile yet lingered on his set features. I could even imagine the words which had accompanied it, when swift and sudden, without one moment’s grace for repentance or confession, death had been meted out to him. At one moment he stood erect and full of life, mocking, it may be, her who had trusted him and had been betrayed; at the next, before the sentence he was speaking was completed, he lay lifeless at her feet, with the snowflakes beginning to form his winding-sheet!
Oh, it was vengeance! Swift, deadly vengeance! But why, oh why had she wreaked it? Philippa, my peerless Philippa, a murderess! Oh, it was too fearful, too horrible! I must be dreaming. All my own thoughts of revenge left me. It was for the time pity, sheer pity, I felt for the man, cut off in the prime of his life. Whilst I knew he was alive I could look forward to and picture that minute when we should stand coolly seeking to kill one another; but now that he was dead, I hated him no longer. Ah! Death is a sacred thing. Dead! Sir Mervyn Ferrand dead, and slain by Philippa!
It could not be true! It should not be true! Yet I shuddered as I remembered the passion she had thrown into those words, ‘Basil, did you ever hate a man?’ I gave a low cry of anguish as I remembered how I had hurled from me the pistol she had let fall—the very weapon which had done the dreadful deed.
Killed by Philippa! Not in a sudden burst of uncontrollable passion, but with deliberate intent. She must have gone armed to meet him. She must have shot him through the heart; must have seen him fall. Then, only then, the horrible deed which she had wrought must have been fully realised! Then she had turned and fled from the spot in a frenzy. Oh, my poor girl! My poor girl!
Utterly bewildered by my anguish, I rose from my knees and stood for a while beside the corpse. It was in that moment I learnt how much I really loved the woman who had done this thing. Over all my grief and horror this love rose paramount. At all cost I must save her—save her from the hands of justice; save her from the fierce elements which her tender frame was even at this moment braving. And as I recalled how she had sought me yesterday with the tale of her wrong—how she had wildly fled from me, a few minutes ago, madly, blindly into the night; as I thought of the injuries she had suffered, and which had led her to shed this man’s blood; as I contrasted her in her present position with what she was when first I knew her and loved her, the pity began to fade from my heart; my thoughts towards the lifeless form at my feet grew stern and sombre, and I found myself beginning, by the old code of an eye for an eye, to justify, although I regretted, Philippa’s fearful act. Right or wrong, she was the woman I loved; and I swore I would save her from the consequences of her crime, even—heaven help me!—if the accusation, when made, must fall upon my shoulders.
Yet it was not the beginning of any scheme to evade justice which induced me to raise the dead body and bear it to the side of the road, where I placed it under the low bank on which the hedge grew. It was the reverence which one pays to death made me do this. I could not leave the poor wretch bang in the very middle of the highway, for the first passer-by to stumble against. Tomorrow he would, of course, be found. Tomorrow the hue and cry would be out! Tomorrow Philippa, my Philippa, would—Oh, heavens! Never, never, never!
So I laid what was left of Sir Mervyn Ferrand reverentially by the side of the lonely road. I even tried to close his glassy eyes, and I covered his face with his own handkerchief.