Aylwin Part 16

When I sat with closed eyes examining my fiery photograph, I had calculated the 'settlement' at the return of the tide as being among the chances of escape. But feeling myself to be engaged in a duel with Circ.u.mstance (more cruel than the fiends), I believed that the settlement would come too late for us, or even if it did not come too late, it might not hide away the spectacle. The settlement had come; what had it done for us? This I must know at once.

'Untie the rope,' I said; 'quick, untie the rope, there is a settlement of the landslip.'

'But what has the settlement to do with us?' said Winnie.

'It _has_ to do with us, dear; untie the rope. It has much to do with us, Winnie,' I said; for now the determination to save her life came on me stronger than ever.

When the rope was untied, I said, 'Wait till I call,' and I ran round the corner of the _debris_. The great upright wall of earth and sward, from which had stared the body of Wynne, had fallen, hiding him and his crime together!

To return round the corner of the landslip and call Winifred was the work of an instant, and, quick as she was in answering my call, by the time she had reached me I had thrown off my coat and boots.

'Now for a run and a tussle with the waves, Winnie,' I said.

'Then we are not going to die?'

'We are going to live. Run; in six more returns of a wave like that there will he four feet of water at the Point.'

'Come along, Snap,' said Winifred, and she flew along the sands without another word.

Ah, she could run!--faster than I could, with my bruised heel! She was there first.

'Leap in, Winnie,' I cried, 'and struggle towards the Point; it will save time. I shall he with you in a second.'

Winifred plunged into the tide (Snap following with a bark), and fought her way so bravely that my fear now was lest she should be out of her depth before I could reach her, and then, clad as she was, she would certainly drown. But never tor a moment did her good sense leave her. When she was nearly waist-high she stopped and turned round, gazing at me as I tore through the shallow water--gazing with a wistful, curious look that her face would have worn had we been playing.

To get round the Point and pull Winifred round was no slight task, for the water was nearly up to my breast, and a woman's clothing seems designed for drowning her. Any other woman than Winifred _would_ have been drowned, and would have drowned me with her. But in straits of this kind the only safety lies in courage.

'What a night's adventures!' said Winifred, after we had turned the Point, and were walking through the shallow water towards the gangway.

We hurried towards the cottage as fast as our wet clothes would permit. On reaching it we found the door unlocked, and entered.

'Father has again gone to bed,' said Winifred, 'and left no candle burning for me.'

And without seeing her face, I knew by the tremor of the hand I clasped that she was listening with shame for the drunken snore that she would never hear again.

I lighted a match, which with a candle I found on a chair.

'Your father is no doubt sound asleep,' I said; 'you will scarcely awake him to-night?'

'Oh dear, no,' said Winifred. 'Good-night. You look quite ill. Ever since you lifted up your head from my breast, when you were thinking so hard, you have looked quite ill.'

Suddenly I remembered that I must be up and on the sands betimes in the morning, to see whether the tide had washed away the fallen earth so as to expose Wynne's body. To prevent Winifred from seeing the stolen cross was now the one important thing in the world.

I bade her good-night and walked towards home.

XI

She was right: those few minutes of concentrated agony had in truth made me ill. My wet clothes clinging round my body began to chill me now, and as I crept into the house and upstairs to my room, my teeth were chattering like castanets.

As I threw off my wet clothes and turned into bed, I was partially forewarned by the throbbing at my temples, the rolling fire at the back of my eyeb.a.l.l.s, the thirst in my parched throat, that some kind of illness, some kind of fever, was upon me. And no wonder, after such a night!

In that awful trance, when I had sat with my face buried on Winifred's breast, not only had the physiognomy of the cove, but every circ.u.mstance of our lives together, been photographed in my brain in one picture of fire. When, after the concentrated agony of those first moments of tension, I looked up into Winifred's face, as though awakening from a dream, my flesh had 'appeared,' she told me, 'grey and wizened, like the flesh of an old man.' The mental and physical effects of this were now gathering around me and upon me.

From a painful slumber I awoke in about an hour with red-heat at my brain and with a sickening dread at my heart. 'It is fever,' thought I; 'I am going to be ill; and what is there to do in the morning at the ebb of the tide before Winifred can go upon the sands? I ought not to have come home at all,' I said. 'Suppose illness were to seize me and prevent my getting there?' The dreadful thought alone paralysed me quite. Under it I lay as under a nightmare. I scarcely dared try to get out of bed, lest I should find my fears well-grounded. At last, cautiously and timorously, I put one leg out of bed and then the other, till at length I felt the little ridges of the carpet; but my knees gave way, my head swam, my stomach heaved with a deadly nausea, and I fell like a log on the floor.

As I lay there I knew that I was indeed in the grasp of fever. I nearly went crazed from terror at the thought that in a few minutes I should perhaps lapse into unconsciousness and be unable to rise--unable to reach the sands in the morning and seek for Wynne's body--unable even to send some one there as a subst.i.tute to perform that task. But then whom was I to send? whom could I entrust with such a commission? I was under a pledge to my dead father never to divulge the secret of the amulet save to my mother and uncle. And besides, if I would effectually save Winifred from the harm I dreaded, the hideous sacrilege committed by her father must be kept a secret from servants and townspeople. Whom then could I send on this errand? At the present moment, there were but four people in the world who knew that the cross and casket had been placed in the coffin--my mother, my uncle, myself, and now, alas! Winifred. My mother was the one person who could do what I wanted done. Her sagacity I knew; her courage I knew. But how could I--how dare I, broach such a matter to her? I felt it would be sheer madness to do so, and yet, in my dire strait, in my terror at the illness I was fighting with, I did it, as I am going to tell.

By this time the noise of my fall had brought up the servants. They lifted me into bed and proposed fetching our medical man. But I forbade them to do so, and said, 'I want to speak to my mother.'

'She is herself unwell, sir,' said the man to whom I spoke.

'I know,' I replied. 'Call her maid and tell her that my business with my mother is very important, or I would not have dreamed of disturbing her; but see her I must.'

The man looked dubious, but observing my wet clothes on a chair he seemed to think that something had happened, and went to do my bidding.

In a very short time my mother entered the room. I felt that my moments of consciousness were brief, and began my story as soon as we were alone. I told her how the sudden dread that Wynne would steal the amulet had come upon me; I told her how I had run down to the churchyard and discovered the landslip; I told her how, on seeing the landslip, I had descended the gangway and found the body of Wynne, the amulet, the casket, and the written curse. But I did not tell her that I had met Winifred on the sands. Excited as I was, I had the presence of mind not to tell her that.

As I proceeded with my narrative, with my mother sitting by my bedside, a look of horror, then a look of loathing, then a look of scorn, swept over her face. I knew that the horror was of the sacrilege. I knew that the loathing and the haughty scorn expressed her feeling towards the despoiler--the father of her whose cause I might have to plead; and I began to wish from the bottom of my heart that I had not taken her into my confidence. When I got to the finding of Tom's body, and the look of terror stamped upon his face, a new expression broke over hers--an expression of triumphant hate that was fearful.

'Thank G.o.d at least for that!' she said. Then she murmured, 'But that does not atone.'

Ah! how I regretted now that I had consulted her on a subject where her proud imperious nature must be so deeply disturbed. But it was too late to retreat.

'Henry,' she said, 'this is a shocking story you tell me. After losing my husband this is the worst that could have happened to me--the violation of his sacred tomb. Had I only hearkened to my own misgiving about the miscreant! Yet I wonder you did not wait till the morning before telling me.'

'Wait till the morning?' I said, forgetting that she did not know what was at my heart.

'Doubtless the matter is important, Henry,' said she. 'Still, the mischief is done, the hideous crime has been committed, and the news of it could have waited till morning.'

'But, mother, unless my father's words are idle breath, it is important, most important, that the amulet should again be buried with him. I meant to go to the sands in the morning and wait for the ebbing tide--I meant to take the cross from the breast of the dead man, and to replace it in my father's coffin. That, mother, was what I meant to do. But I am too ill to move; I feel that in an hour or so, or in a few minutes, I shall be delirious. And then, mother! Oh, _then_!--'My mother looked astonished at my vehemence upon the subject.

'Henry,' she said, 'I had no idea that you felt such an interest in the matter; I have certainly misjudged your character entirely. And now, what do you want me to do?'

'n.o.body,' I said, 'must know of the cross but ourselves. I want you, mother, to do what I cannot do: I want you to go on the sands and wait for the turn of the tide; I want you to take the cross from Wynne's breast, if the body should be exposed, and secure it in secret till it can be replaced in the coffin.'

'_I_ do this, Henry?' said my mother, with a look of bewilderment at my earnestness. 'Yet there is reason in what you say, and grievous as the task would be for me, I must consider it.'

'But will you engage to do it, mother?'

'Really, Henry, you forget yourself,--you forget your mother too. For me to go down to the sands and watch the ebbing of the tide, and then defile myself by touching the body of this wretch, is a task I naturally shrink from. Still if, on thinking it over, I find it my duty to do it, it will not be needful for me to enter into a compact with my son that my duty to my dead husband shall be performed.

Good-night. I quite think you will be better in the morning. I see no signs myself of the fever you seem to dread, and, alas! I am not, as you know, ignorant of the way in which a fever begins.'

She was going out of the room when I exclaimed, in sheer desperation, 'Mother, I have something else to say to you. You remember the little girl, the little blue-eyed girl, Wynne's daughter, who came here once, and you were so kind to her, so gracious and so kind'; and I seized her hand and covered it with kisses, for I was beside myself with alarm lest my one hope should go.'

The sudden little laugh of bitter scorn that came from my mother's lips, the sudden spasm that shook her frame, the sudden shadow as of night that swept across her features, should at once have hushed my confession. But I went on: my tongue would not stop now: I felt that my eloquence, the eloquence of Winifred's danger, must conquer, must soften even the hard pride of her race.

'And she has never forgotten your graciousness to her, mother.'