Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (799 page)

In one of these pauses borne in the wind faintly as if from very far away he heard a sound of knocking, just knocking on wood.  He noticed that the wind had lulled suddenly.

His heart started beating tumultuously because in himself he carried the impression of the desert solitudes he had been traversing for the last six hours — the oppressive sense of an uninhabited world.  When he raised his head a gleam of light, illusory as it often happens in dense darkness, swam before his eyes.  While he peered, the sound of feeble knocking was repeated — and suddenly he felt rather than saw the existence of a massive obstacle in his path.  What was it?  The spur of a hill?  Or was it a house!  Yes.  It was a house right close, as though it had risen from the ground or had come gliding to meet him, dumb and pallid; from some dark recess of the night.  It towered loftily.  He had come up under its lee; another three steps and he could have touched the wall with his hand.  It was no doubt a posada and some other traveller was trying for admittance.  He heard again the sound of cautious knocking.

Next moment a broad band of light fell into the night through the opened door.  Byrne stepped eagerly into it, whereupon the person outside leaped with a stifled cry away into the night.  An exclamation of surprise was heard too, from within.  Byrne, flinging himself against the half closed door, forced his way in against some considerable resistance.

A miserable candle, a mere rushlight, burned at the end of a long deal table.  And in its light Byrne saw, staggering yet, the girl he had driven from the door.  She had a short black skirt, an orange shawl, a dark complexion — and the escaped single hairs from the mass, sombre and thick like a forest and held up by a comb, made a black mist about her low forehead.  A shrill lamentable howl of: “Misericordia!” came in two voices from the further end of the long room, where the fire-light of an open hearth played between heavy shadows.  The girl recovering herself drew a hissing breath through her set teeth.

It is unnecessary to report the long process of questions and answers by which he soothed the fears of two old women who sat on each side of the fire, on which stood a large earthenware pot.  Byrne thought at once of two witches watching the brewing of some deadly potion.  But all the same, when one of them raising forward painfully her broken form lifted the cover of the pot, the escaping steam had an appetising smell.  The other did not budge, but sat hunched up, her head trembling all the time.

They were horrible.  There was something grotesque in their decrepitude.  Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one’s eyes, had not gripped one’s heart with poignant amazement at the unspeakable misery of age, at the awful persistency of life becoming at last an object of disgust and dread.

To get over it Byrne began to talk, saying that he was an Englishman, and that he was in search of a countryman who ought to have passed this way.  Directly he had spoken the recollection of his parting with Tom came up in his mind with amazing vividness: the silent villagers, the angry gnome, the one-eyed wine-seller, Bernardino.  Why!  These two unspeakable frights must be that man’s aunts — affiliated to the devil.

Whatever they had been once it was impossible to imagine what use such feeble creatures could be to the devil, now, in the world of the living.  Which was Lucilla and which was Erminia?  They were now things without a name.  A moment of suspended animation followed Byrne’s words.  The sorceress with the spoon ceased stirring the mess in the iron pot, the very trembling of the other’s head stopped for the space of breath.  In this infinitesimal fraction of a second Byrne had the sense of being really on his quest, of having reached the turn of the path, almost within hail of Tom.

“They have seen him,” he thought with conviction.  Here was at last somebody who had seen him.  He made sure they would deny all knowledge of the Ingles; but on the contrary they were eager to tell him that he had eaten and slept the night in the house.  They both started talking together, describing his appearance and behaviour.  An excitement quite fierce in its feebleness possessed them.  The doubled-up sorceress flourished aloft her wooden spoon, the puffy monster got off her stool and screeched, stepping from one foot to the other, while the trembling of her head was accelerated to positive vibration.  Byrne was quite disconcerted by their excited behaviour. . . Yes!  The big, fierce Ingles went away in the morning, after eating a piece of bread and drinking some wine.  And if the caballero wished to follow the same path nothing could be easier — in the morning.

“You will give me somebody to show me the way?” said Byrne.

“Si, señor.  A proper youth.  The man the caballero saw going out.”

“But he was knocking at the door,” protested Byrne.  “He only bolted when he saw me.  He was coming in.”

“No!  No!” the two horrid witches screamed out together.  “Going out. Going out!”

After all it may have been true. The sound of knocking had been faint, elusive, reflected Byrne.  Perhaps only the effect of his fancy.  He asked —

“Who is that man?”

“Her novio.”  They screamed pointing to the girl.  “He is gone home to a village far away from here.  But he will return in the morning.  Her novio!  And she is an orphan — the child of poor Christian people.  She lives with us for the love of God, for the love of God.”

The orphan crouching on the corner of the hearth had been looking at Byrne.  He thought that she was more like a child of Satan kept there by these two weird harridans for the love of the Devil.  Her eyes were a little oblique, her mouth rather thick, but admirably formed; her dark face had a wild beauty, voluptuous and untamed.  As to the character of her steadfast gaze attached upon him with a sensuously savage attention, “to know what it was like,” says Mr. Byrne, “you have only to observe a hungry cat watching a bird in a cage or a mouse inside a trap.”

It was she who served him the food, of which he was glad; though with those big slanting black eyes examining him at close range, as if he had something curious written on his face, she gave him an uncomfortable sensation.  But anything was better than being approached by these blear-eyed nightmarish witches.  His apprehensions somehow had been soothed; perhaps by the sensation of warmth after severe exposure and the ease of resting after the exertion of fighting the gale inch by inch all the way.  He had no doubt of Tom’s safety.  He was now sleeping in the mountain camp having been met by Gonzales’ men.

Byrne rose, filled a tin goblet with wine out of a skin hanging on the wall, and sat down again.  The witch with the mummy face began to talk to him, ramblingly of old times; she boasted of the inn’s fame in those better days.  Great people in their own coaches stopped there.  An archbishop slept once in the casa, a long, long time ago.

The witch with the puffy face seemed to be listening from her stool, motionless, except for the trembling of her head.  The girl (Byrne was certain she was a casual gipsy admitted there for some reason or other) sat on the hearth stone in the glow of the embers.  She hummed a tune to herself, rattling a pair of castanets slightly now and then.  At the mention of the archbishop she chuckled impiously and turned her head to look at Byrne, so that the red glow of the fire flashed in her black eyes and on her white teeth under the dark cowl of the enormous overmantel.  And he smiled at her.

He rested now in the ease of security.  His advent not having been expected there could be no plot against him in existence.  Drowsiness stole upon his senses.  He enjoyed it, but keeping a hold, so he thought at least, on his wits; but he must have been gone further than he thought because he was startled beyond measure by a fiendish uproar.  He had never heard anything so pitilessly strident in his life.  The witches had started a fierce quarrel about something or other.  Whatever its origin they were now only abusing each other violently, without arguments; their senile screams expressed nothing but wicked anger and ferocious dismay.  The gipsy girl’s black eyes flew from one to the other.  Never before had Byrne felt himself so removed from fellowship with human beings.  Before he had really time to understand the subject of the quarrel, the girl jumped up rattling her castanets loudly.  A silence fell.  She came up to the table and bending over, her eyes in his —

“Señor,” she said with decision, “You shall sleep in the archbishop’s room.”

Neither of the witches objected.  The dried-up one bent double was propped on a stick.  The puffy faced one had now a crutch.

Byrne got up, walked to the door, and turning the key in the enormous lock put it coolly in his pocket.  This was clearly the only entrance, and he did not mean to be taken unawares by whatever danger there might have been lurking outside.

When he turned from the door he saw the two witches “affiliated to the Devil” and the Satanic girl looking at him in silence.  He wondered if Tom Corbin took the same precaution last might.  And thinking of him he had again that queer impression of his nearness.  The world was perfectly dumb.  And in this stillness he heard the blood beating in his ears with a confused rushing noise, in which there seemed to be a voice uttering the words: “Mr. Byrne, look out, sir.”  Tom’s voice.  He shuddered; for the delusions of the senses of hearing are the most vivid of all, and from their nature have a compelling character.

It seemed impossible that Tom should not be there.  Again a slight chill as of stealthy draught penetrated through his very clothes and passed over all his body.  He shook off the impression with an effort.

It was the girl who preceded him upstairs carrying an iron lamp from the naked flame of which ascended a thin thread of smoke.  Her soiled white stockings were full of holes.

With the same quiet resolution with which he had locked the door below, Byrne threw open one after another the doors in the corridor.  All the rooms were empty except for some nondescript lumber in one or two.  And the girl seeing what he would be at stopped every time, raising the smoky light in each doorway patiently.  Meantime she observed him with sustained attention.  The last door of all she threw open herself.

“You sleep here, señor,” she murmured in a voice light like a child’s breath, offering him the lamp.

“Buenos noches, senorita,” he said politely, taking it from her.

She didn’t return the wish audibly, though her lips did move a little, while her gaze black like a starless night never for a moment wavered before him.  He stepped in, and as he turned to close the door she was still there motionless and disturbing, with her voluptuous mouth and slanting eyes, with the expression of expectant sensual ferocity of a baffled cat.  He hesitated for a moment, and in the dumb house he heard again the blood pulsating ponderously in his ears, while once more the illusion of Tom’s voice speaking earnestly somewhere near by was specially terrifying, because this time he could not make out the words.

He slammed the door in the girl’s face at last, leaving her in the dark; and he opened it again almost on the instant.  Nobody.  She had vanished without the slightest sound.  He closed the door quickly and bolted it with two heavy bolts.

A profound mistrust possessed him suddenly.  Why did the witches quarrel about letting him sleep here?  And what meant that stare of the girl as if she wanted to impress his features for ever in her mind?  His own nervousness alarmed him.  He seemed to himself to be removed very far from mankind.

He examined his room.  It was not very high, just high enough to take the bed which stood under an enormous baldaquin-like canopy from which fell heavy curtains at foot and head; a bed certainly worthy of an archbishop.  There was a heavy table carved all round the edges, some arm-chairs of enormous weight like the spoils of a grandee’s palace; a tall shallow wardrobe placed against the wall and with double doors.  He tried them.  Locked.  A suspicion came into his mind, and he snatched the lamp to make a closer examination.  No, it was not a disguised entrance.  That heavy, tall piece of furniture stood clear of the wall by quite an inch.  He glanced at the bolts of his room door.  No!  No one could get at him treacherously while he slept.  But would he be able to sleep? he asked himself anxiously.  If only he had Tom there — the trusty seaman who had fought at his right hand in a cutting out affair or two, and had always preached to him the necessity to take care of himself.  “For it’s no great trick,” he used to say, “to get yourself killed in a hot fight.  Any fool can do that.  The proper pastime is to fight the Frenchies and then live to fight another day.”

Byrne found it a hard matter not to fall into listening to the silence.  Somehow he had the conviction that nothing would break it unless he heard again the haunting sound of Tom’s voice.  He had heard it twice before.  Odd!  And yet no wonder, he argued with himself reasonably, since he had been thinking of the man for over thirty hours continuously and, what’s more, inconclusively.  For his anxiety for Tom had never taken a definite shape.  “Disappear,” was the only word connected with the idea of Tom’s danger.  It was very vague and awful.  “Disappear!”  What did that mean?

Byrne shuddered, and then said to himself that he must be a little feverish.  But Tom had not disappeared.  Byrne had just heard of him.  And again the young man felt the blood beating in his ears.  He sat still expecting every moment to hear through the pulsating strokes the sound of Tom’s voice.  He waited straining his ears, but nothing came.  Suddenly the thought occurred to him: “He has not disappeared, but he cannot make himself heard.”

He jumped up from the arm-chair.  How absurd!  Laying his pistol and his hanger on the table he took off his boots and, feeling suddenly too tired to stand, flung himself on the bed which he found soft and comfortable beyond his hopes.

He had felt very wakeful, but he must have dozed off after all, because the next thing he knew he was sitting up in bed and trying to recollect what it was that Tom’s voice had said.  Oh!  He remembered it now.  It had said: “Mr. Byrne!  Look out, sir!”  A warning this.  But against what?