Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers. Robert W. Chambers

d’Yniol,’ I repeated aloud, ‘confound it, I’ve heard that name! Now, where the deuce – where in the name of all that’s queer—’ Somebody who had sat down on the bench beside me placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

      It was the Frenchman, ‘Soger Charlie’.

      ‘You spoke my name,’ he said in apathetic tones.

      ‘Your name!’

      ‘Captain d’Yniol,’ he repeated; ‘it is my name.’

      I recognized him in spite of the black goggles he was wearing, and, at the same moment it flashed into my mind that d’Yniol was the name of the traitor who had escaped. Ah, I remembered now!

      ‘I am Captain d’Yniol,’ he said again, and I saw his fingers closing on my coat sleeve.

      It may have been my involuntary movement of recoil – I don’t know – but the fellow dropped my coat and sat straight up on the bench.

      ‘I am Captain d’Yniol,’ he said for the third time, ‘charged with treason and under sentence of death.’

      ‘And innocent!’ I muttered, before I was even conscious of having spoken. What was it that wrung those involuntary words from my lips, I shall never know, perhaps – but it was I, not he, who trembled, seized with a strange agitation, and it was I, not he, whose hand was stretched forth impulsively, touching his.

      Without a tremor he took my hand, pressed it almost imperceptibly, and dropped it. Then I held both letters toward him, and, as he neither looked at them nor at me, I placed them in his hand. Then he started.

      ‘Read them,’ I said, ‘they are for you.’

      ‘Letters!’ he gasped in a voice that sounded like nothing human.

      ‘Yes, they are for you – I know it now—’

      ‘Letters! – letters directed to me?’

      ‘Can you not see?’ I cried.

      Then he raised one frail hand and drew the goggles from his eyes, and, as I looked I saw two tiny white specks exactly in the centre of both pupils.

      ‘Blind!’ I faltered.

      ‘I have been unable to read for two years,’ he said.

      After a moment he placed the tip of one finger on the letters.

      ‘They are wet,’ I said; ‘shall – would you like to have me read them?’ For a long time he sat silently in the sunshine, fumbling with his cane, and I watched him without speaking. At last he said, ‘Read, Monsieur,’ and I took the letters and broke the seals.

      The first letter contained a sheet of paper, damp and discolored, on which a few lines were written:

      My darling, I knew you were innocent—

      Here the writing ended, but, in the blur beneath, I read:

      Paris shall know – France shall know, for at last I have the proofs and I am coming to find you, my soldier, and to place them in your own dear brave hands. They know, now, at the War Ministry – they have a copy of the traitor’s confession – but they dare not make it public – they dare not withstand the popular astonishment and rage. Therefore I sail on Monday from Cherbourg by the Green Cross Line, to bring you back to your own again, where you will stand before all the world, without fear, without reproach.

      ALINE.

      ‘This – this is terrible!’ I stammered; ‘can God live and see such things done!’

      But with his thin hand he gripped my arm again, bidding me read the other letter; and I shuddered at the menace in his voice.

      Then, with his sightless eyes on me, I drew the other letter from the wet, stained envelope. And before I was aware – before I understood the purport of what I saw, I had read aloud these half effaced lines:

      ‘The Lorient is sinking – an iceberg – mid-ocean – good-bye – you are innocent – I love—’

      ‘The Lorient!’ I cried; ‘it was the French steamer that was never heard from – the Lorient of the Green Cross Line! I had forgotten – I—’

      The loud crash of a revolver stunned me; my ears rang and ached with it as I shrank back from a ragged dusty figure that collapsed on the bench beside me, shuddered a moment, and tumbled to the asphalt at my feet.

      The trampling of the eager hard-eyed crowd, the dust and taint of powder in the hot air, the harsh alarm of the ambulance clattering up Mail Street – these I remember, as I knelt there, helplessly holding the dead man’s hands in mine.

      ‘Soger Charlie,’ mused the sparrow policeman, ‘shot his-self, didn’t he, Mr Hilton? You seen him, sir – blowed the top of his head off, didn’t he, Mr Hilton?’

      ‘Soger Charlie,’ they repeated, ‘a French dago what shot his-self’; and the words echoed in my ears long after the ambulance rattled away, and the increasing throng dispersed, sullenly, as a couple of policemen cleared a space around the pool of thick blood on the asphalt.

      They wanted me as a witness, and I gave my card to one of the policemen who knew me. The rabble transferred its fascinated stare to me, and I turned away and pushed a path between frightened shop girls and ill-smelling loafers, until I lost myself in the human torrent of Broadway.

      The torrent took me with it where it flowed – East? West? – I did not notice nor care, but I passed on through the throng, listless, deadly weary of attempting to solve God’s justice – striving to understand His purpose – His laws – His judgments which are ‘true and righteous altogether.’

      IV

      ‘More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold. Sweeter also than honey and the honey-comb!’

      I turned sharply toward the speaker who shambled at my elbow. His sunken eyes were dull and lustreless, his bloodless face gleamed pallid as a death mask above the blood-red jersey – the emblem of the soldiers of Christ.

      I don’t know why I stopped, lingering, but, as he passed, I said, ‘Brother, I also was meditating upon God’s wisdom and His testimonies.’

      The pale fanatic shot a glance at me, hesitated, and fell into my own pace, walking by my side. Under the peak of his Salvation Army cap his eyes shone in the shadow with a strange light.

      ‘Tell me more,’ I said, sinking my voice below the roar of traffic, the clang! clang! of the cable-cars, and the noise of feet on the worn pavements – ‘tell me of His testimonies.’

      ‘Moreover by them is Thy servant warned and in keeping of them there is great reward. Who can understand His errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright and I shall be innocent from the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight – O Lord! My strength and my Redeemer!’

      ‘It is Holy Scripture that you quote,’ I said; ‘I also can read that when I choose. But it cannot clear for me the reasons – it cannot make me understand—’

      ‘What?’ he asked and muttered to himself.

      ‘That, for instance,’ I replied, pointing to a cripple, who had been born deaf and dumb and horridly misshapen – a wretched diseased lump on the sidewalk below St Paul’s Churchyard – a sore-eyed thing that mouthed and mowed and rattled pennies in a tin cup as though the sound of copper could stem the human pack that passed hot on the scent of gold.

      Then the man who shambled beside me turned and looked long and earnestly into my eyes. And after a moment a dull recollection stirred within me – a vague something that seemed like the awakening memory of a past, long, long forgotten, dim, dark, too subtle,