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Burning Secret

<h2>CHAPTER XII THE TEMPEST</h2> EDGAR woke up the next morning dazed, wondering whether it had not been a horrid dream, and with the sickly feeling that hangs on after a nightmare, his head leaden and his body like a piece of wood. It was only after a minute or so that he realized with a sort of alarm that he was still in his day clothes. He jumped out of bed and went to look at himself in the mirror. The image of his own pale, distorted face, with his hair all rumpled and a red, elongated swelling on his forehead, made him recoil with a shudder. It brought back to him the actuality painfully. He recalled the details of the battle in the corridor, and his rushing back to his room and throwing himself on to the bed dressed. He must have fallen asleep thus and dreamed everything over again, only worse and mingled with the warmish smell of fresh flowing blood. Footsteps crunched on the gravel beneath his window, voices rose like invisible birds, and the sun shone deep into the room. “It must be very late,” he thought, glancing at his watch. But the hands pointed to midnight. In the excitement of the day before he had forgotten to wind it up. This uncertainty, this hanging suspended in time, disturbed him, and his sense of disgust was increased by his confusion of mind as to what had actually occurred. He dressed quickly and went downstairs, a vague sense of guilt in his heart. In the breakfast-room his mother was sitting at their usual table, alone. Thank goodness, his enemy was not present. Edgar would not have to look upon that hateful face of his. And yet, as he went to the table, he was by no means sure of himself. “Good morning,” he said. His mother made no reply, nor even so much as glanced up, but kept her eyes fixed in a peculiarly rigid stare on the view from the window. She looked very pale, her eyes were red-rimmed, and there was that quivering of her nostrils which told so plainly how wrought up she was. Edgar bit his lips. Her silence bewildered him. He really did not know whether he had hurt the baron very much or whether his mother had any knowledge at all of their encounter. The uncertainty plagued him. But her face remained so rigid that he did not even attempt to look up for fear that her eyes, now hidden behind lowered lids, might suddenly raise their curtains and pop out at him. He sat very still, not daring to make the faintest sound, and raising the cup to his lips and putting it back on the saucer with the utmost caution, and casting furtive glances, from time to time, at his mother’s fingers, which played with her spoon nervously and seemed, in the way they were bent, to show a secret anger. For a full quarter of an hour he sat at the table in an oppressive expectancy of something that never came. Not a single word from her to relieve his tension. And now as his mother rose, still without any sign of having noticed his presence, he did not know what to do, whether to remain sitting at the table or to go with her. He decided upon the latter, and followed humbly, though conscious how ridiculous was his shadowing of her now. He reduced his steps so as to fall behind, and she, still studiously refraining from noticing him, went to her room. When Edgar reached her door he found it locked. What had happened? He was at his wits’ end. His assurance of the day before had deserted him. Had he done wrong, after all, in attacking the baron? And were they preparing a punishment for him or a fresh humiliation? Something must happen, he was positive, something dreadful, very soon. Upon him and his mother lay the sultriness of a brewing tempest. They were like two electrified poles that would have to discharge themselves in a flash. And for four solitary hours the child dragged round with him, from room to room, the burden of this premonition, until his thin little neck bent under the invisible yoke, and by midday it was a very humble little fellow that took his seat at table. “How do you do?” he ventured again, feeling he had to rend this silence, ominous as a great black storm cloud. But still his mother made no response, keeping her gaze fixed beyond him. Edgar, in renewed alarm, felt he was in the presence of a calculated, concentrated anger such as he had never before encountered. Until then his mother’s scoldings had been outbursts of nervousness rather than of ill feeling and soon melted into a mollifying smile. This time, however, he had, as he sensed, brought to the surface a wild emotion from the deeps of her being, and this powerful something that he had evoked terrified him. He scarcely dared to eat. His throat was parched and knotted into a lump. His mother seemed not to notice what was passing in her son, but when she got up she turned, with a casual air, and said: “Come up to my room afterwards, Edgar, I have something to say to you.” Her tone was not threatening, but so icy that Edgar felt as though each word were like a link in an iron chain being laid round his neck. His defiance had been crushed out of him. Silently, with a hang-dog air, he followed her up to her room. In the room she prolonged his agony by saying nothing for several minutes, during which he heard the striking of the clock, and outside a child laughing, and within his own breast his heart beating like a trip-hammer. Yet she, too, could not be feeling so very confident of herself either, because she kept her eyes averted and even turned her back while speaking to him. “I shall say nothing to you about the way you behaved yesterday. It was unpardonable, and it makes me feel ashamed to think of it. You have to suffer the consequences now of your own conduct. All I mean to say to you is that this is the last time you will be allowed to associate with your elders. I have just written to your father that either you must be put under a tutor or sent to a boarding-school where you will be taught manners. I sha’n’t be bothered with you any more.” Edgar stood with bowed head, feeling that this was only the preliminary, a threat of the real thing coming, and he waited uneasily for the sequel. “You will ask the baron’s pardon.” Edgar gave a start, but his mother would not be interrupted. “The baron left to-day, and you will write him a letter which I shall dictate.” Edgar again made a movement, which his mother firmly disregarded. “No protestations. Here is the paper, and here are the pen and the ink. Sit down.” Edgar looked up. Her eyes were steely with an inflexible determination. This hardness and composure in his mother were quite new and strange. He was frightened, and seated himself at the desk, keeping his face bent low. “The date—upper right-hand corner. Have you written it? Space. Dear Sir, colon. Next line. I have just learned to my regret—got that?—to my regret that you have already left Summering. Two m’s in Summering. And so I must do by letter what I had intended to do in person, that is—faster, Edgar, you don’t have to draw each letter—beg your pardon for what I did yesterday. As my mother told you, I am just convalescing from a severe illness and am very excitable. On account of my condition, I often exaggerate things and the next moment I am sorry for it.” The back bent over the desk straightened up. Edgar turned in a flash. His defiance had leapt into life again. “I will not write that. It isn’t true.” “Edgar!” “It is not true. I haven’t done anything that I should be sorry for. I haven’t done anything bad that I need ask anybody’s pardon for. I simply came to your rescue when you called for help.” Every drop of blood left her lips, her nostrils widened. “I called for help? You’re crazy.” Edgar got angry and jumped up from his chair. “Yes, you did call for help, in the corridor, when he caught hold of you. You said, ‘Let me go, let me go,’ so loud that I heard it in my room.” “You lie. I never was in the corridor with the baron. He went with me only as far as the foot of the stairs——” Edgar’s heart stood still at the barefacedness of the lie. He stared at her with glassy eyeballs, and cried in a voice thick and husky with passion: “You—were not—in the hall? And he—he did not have his arm round you?” She laughed a cold, dry laugh. “You were dreaming.” That was too much. The child, by this time, knew that adults lie and resort to impudent little evasions, lies that slip through fine sieves, and cunning ambiguities. But this downright denial of an absolute fact, face to face, threw him into a frenzy. “Dreaming, was I? Did I dream this bump on my forehead, too?” “How do I know whom you’ve been rowdying with? But I am not going to argue with you. You are to obey orders. That’s all. Sit down and finish the letter.” She was very pale and was summoning all her strength to keep on her feet. In Edgar, a last tiny flame of credulity went out. To tread on the truth and extinguish it as one would a burning match was more than he could stomach. His insides congealed in an icy lump, and everything he now said was in a tone of unrestrained, pointed maliciousness. “So I dreamed what I saw in the hall, did I? I dreamed this bump on my forehead, and that you two went walking in the moonlight and he wanted to make you go down the dark path into the valley? I dreamed all that, did I? What do you think, that I am going to let myself be locked up like a baby? No, I am not so stupid as you think. I know what I know.” He stared into her face impudently. To see her child’s face close to her own distorted by hate broke her down completely. Her passion flooded over in a tidal wave. “Sit down and write that letter, or——” “Or what?” he sneered. “Or I’ll give you a whipping like a little child.” Edgar drew close to her and merely laughed sardonically. With that her hand was out and had struck his face. Edgar gave a little outcry, and, like a drowning man, with a dull rushing in his ears and flickerings in his eyes, he struck out blindly with both fists. He felt he encountered something soft, a face, heard a cry.... The cry brought him to his senses. Suddenly he saw himself and his monstrous act—he had struck his own mother. A dreadful terror came upon him, shame and horror, an impetuous need to get away seized him, to sink into the earth; he wanted to fly far away, far away from those eyes that were upon him. He made for the door and in an instant was gone, down the stairs, through the lobby, out on the road. Away, away, as though a pack of ravening beasts were at his heels. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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