Ah," she cried, with a shocking insolence of look and manner, "if our friend could only hear what I am saying!"
He had paused while she was speaking, observing her attentively. "Your face doesn't encourage me," he said, with a patience and courtesy of manner which it was impossible not to admire. "I am coming gradually to my greatest triumph; and I think I can surprise and please you."
He timed his last trick, and returned to the table placed against the wall.
"Excuse me for a moment," he resumed; "I am suffering as usual, after drinking tea. I so delight in it that the temptation to-night was more than I could resist. Tea disagrees with my weak stomach. It always produces thirst."
"What nonsense he talks!" Cristel exclaimed. "All mere fancy! He reminds me of the old song called 'The Nervous Man.' Do you know it, Mr. Roylake?"
In spite of my efforts to prevent her, she burst out with the first verse of a stupid comic song. Spared by his deafness from this infliction of vulgarity, our host filled a tumbler from the water in the claret jug, and drank it.
As he set the tumbler down, we were startled by an accident in the next room. The floor was suddenly shaken by the sound of a heavy fall. The fall was followed by a groan which instantly brought me to my feet.
Although his infirmity made him unconscious of the groan, my friend felt the vibration of the floor, and saw me start up from my chair. He looked even more alarmed than I was, judging by the ghastly change that I saw in his color; and he reached the door of the second room as soon as I did. It is needless to say that I allowed him to enter first.
On the point of following him, I felt myself roughly pulled back. When I turned round, and saw Cristel, I did really and truly believe that she was mad. The furious impatience in her eyes, the frenzied strength of her grasp on my arm, would have led most other men to form the same conclusion.
"Come!" she cried. "No! not a word. There isn't a moment to lose." She dragged me across the room to the table on which the claret jug stood. She filled the tumbler from it, as he had filled the tumbler. The material of which the jug had been made was so solid (crystal, not glass as I had supposed) that the filling of the two tumblers emptied it. Cristel held the water out to me, gasping for breath, trembling as if she saw some frightful reptile before her instead of myself.
"Drink it," she said, "if you value your life!"
I should of course have found it perfectly easy to obey her, strange as her language was, if I had been in full possession of myself. Between distress and alarm, my mind (I suppose) had lost its balance. With or without a cause, I hesitated.
She crossed the room, and threw open the window which looked out on the river.
"You shan't die alone," she said. "If you don't drink it, I'll throw myself out!"
I drank from the tumbler to the last drop.
It was not water.
It had a taste which I can compare to no drink, and to no medicine, known to me. I thought of the other strange taste peculiar to the tea. At last, the tremendous truth forced itself on my mind. The man in whom my boyish generosity had so faithfully believed had attempted my life.
Cristel took the tumbler from me. My poor angel clasped her free arm round my neck, and pressed her lips, in an ecstasy of joy, on my cheek. The next instant, she seized the claret jug, and dashed it into pieces on the floor. "Get the jug from his washhand-stand," she said. When I gave it to her, she poured some of the water upon the broken fragments of crystal scattered on the floor. I had put the jug back in its place, and was returning to Cristel, when the poisoner showed himself, entering from the servant's room.
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "Gloody's name ought to be Glutton. An attack of giddiness, thoroughly well deserved. I have relieved him. You remember, Mr. Roylake, that I was once a surgeon--"
The broken claret jug caught his eye.
We have all read of men who were petrified by terror. Of the few persons who have really witnessed that spectacle, I am one. The utter stillness of him was really terrible to see. Cristel wrote in his book an excuse, no doubt prepared beforehand: "That fall in the next room frightened me, and I felt faint. I went to get some water from the jug you drank out of, and it slipped from my hand."
She placed those words under his eyes--she might just as well have shown them to the dog. A dead man, erect on his feet--so he looked to our eyes. So he still looked, when I took Cristel's arm, and led her out of that dreadful presence.
"Take me into the air!" she whispered.
A burst of tears relieved her, after the unutterable suspense that she had so bravely endured. When she was in some degree composed again, we walked gently up and down for a minute or two in the cool night air. "Don't speak to me," she said, as we stopped before her father's door. "I am not fit for it yet; I know what you feel." I pressed her to my heart, and let the embrace speak for me. She yielded to it, faintly sighing. "To-morrow?" I whispered. She bent her head, and left me.
Walking home through the wood, I became aware, little by little, that my thoughts were not under the customary control. Over and over again, I tried to review the events of that terrible evening, and failed. Fragments of other memories presented themselves--and then deserted me. Nonsense, absolute nonsense, found its way into my mind next, and rose in idiotic words to my lips. I grew too lazy even to talk to myself. I strayed from the path. The mossy earth began to rise and sink under my feet, like the waters in a ground-swell at sea. I stood still, in a state of idiot-wonder. The ground suddenly rose right up to my face. I remember no more.
My first conscious exercise of my senses, when I revived, came to me by way of my ears. Leaden weights seemed to close my eyes, to fetter my movements, to silence my tongue, to paralyze my touch. But I heard a wailing voice, speaking close to me, so close that it might have been my own voice: I distinguished the words; I knew the tones.
"Oh, my master, my lord, who am I that I should live--and you die! and you die!"
Was it her warm young breath that quickened me with its vigorous life? I only know that the revival of my sense of touch did certainly spring from the contact of her lips, pressed to mine in the reckless abandonment of grief without hope. Her cry of joy, when my first sigh told her that I was still a living creature, ran through me like an electric shock. I opened my eyes; I held out my hand; I tried to help her when she raised my head, and set me against the tree under which I had been stretched helpless. With an effort I could call her by her name. Even that exhausted me. My mind was so weak that I should have believed her, if she had declared herself to be a spirit seen in a dream, keeping watch over me in the wood.
Wiser than I was, she snatched up my hat, ran on before me, and was lost in the darkness.
An interval, an unendurable interval, passed.