For the Blood is the Life and Other Stories

SIR HUGH OCKRAM smiled as he sat by the open window of his study, in
the late August afternoon. A curiously yellow cloud obscured the low
sun, and the clear summer light turned lurid, as if it had been
suddenly poisoned and polluted by the foul vapours of a plague. Sir
Hugh's face seemed, at best, to be made of fine parchment drawn skin-
tight over a wooden mask, in which two sunken eyes peered from far
within. The eyes peered from under wrinkled lids, alive and watchful
like toads in their holes, side by side and exactly alike. But as the
light changed, a little yellow glare flashed in each. He smiled,
stretching pale lips across discoloured teeth in an expression of
profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred
and contempt for the human doll.

Nurse Macdonald, who was a hundred years old, said that when Sir Hugh
smiled he saw the faces of two women in hell--two dead women he had
betrayed. The smile widened.

The hideous disease of which Sir Hugh was dying had touched his brain.
His son stood beside him, tall, white and delicate as an angel in a
primitive picture. And though there was deep distress in his violet
eyes as he looked at his father's face, he felt the shadow of that
sickening smile stealing across his own lips, parting and drawing them
against his will. It was like a bad dream, for he tried not to smile
and smiled the more.

Beside him--strangely like him in her wan, angelic beauty, with the
same shadowy golden hair, the same sad violet eyes, the same
luminously pale face--Evelyn Warburton rested one hand upon his arm.
As she looked into her uncle's eyes, she could not turn her own away
and she too knew that the deathly smile was hovering on her own red
lips, drawing them tightly across her little teeth, while two bright
tears ran down her cheeks to her mouth, and dropped from the upper to
the lower lip. The smile was like the shadow of death and the seal of
damnation upon her pure, young face.

"Of course," said Sir Hugh very slowly, still looking out at the
trees, "if you have made your mind up to be married, I cannot hinder
you, and I don't suppose you attach the smallest importance to my
consent--"

"Father!" exclaimed Gabriel reproachfully.

"No. I do not deceive myself," continued the old man, smiling
terribly. "You will marry when I am dead, though there is a very good
reason why you had better not--why you had better not," he repeated
very emphatically, and he slowly turned his toad eyes upon the lovers.

"What reason?" asked Evelyn in a frightened voice.

"Never mind the reason, my dear. You will marry just as if it did not
exist." There was a long pause. "Two gone," he said, his voice
lowering strangely, "and two more will be four all together forever
and ever, burning, burning, burning bright."

At the last words his head sank slowly back, and the little glare of
his toad eyes disappeared under the swollen lids. Sir Hugh had fallen
asleep, as he often did in his illness, even while speaking.

Gabriel Ockram drew Evelyn away, and from the study they went out into
the dim hall. Softly closing the door behind them, each audibly drew a
breath, as though some sudden danger had been passed. As they laid
their hands each in the other's, their strangely-like eyes met in a
long look in which love and perfect understanding were darkened by the
secret terror of an unknown thing. Their pale faces reflected each
other's fear.

"It is his secret," said Evelyn at last. "He will never tell us what
it is."

"If he dies with it," answered Gabriel, "let it be on his own head!"

"On his head!" echoed the dim hall. It was a strange echo. Some were
frightened by it, for they said that if it were a real echo it should
repeat everything and not give back a phrase here and there--now
speaking, now silent. Nurse Macdonald said that the great hall would
never echo a prayer when an Ockram was to die, though it would give
back curses ten for one.

"On his head!" it repeated quite softly, and Evelyn started and looked
round.

"It is only the echo," said Gabriel, leading her away.

They went out into the late afternoon light, and sat upon a stone seat
behind the chapel, which had been built across the end of the east
wing. It was very still. Not a breath stirred, and there was no sound
near them. Only far off in the park a song-bird was whistling the high
prelude to the evening chorus.

"It is very lonely here," said Evelyn, taking Gabriel's hand nervously
and speaking as if she dreaded to disturb the silence. "If it were
dark, I should be afraid."