The Golden Web Part 42

The evening pa.s.sed swiftly into night as they thundered up the great north road into the darkness. Deane, wrapped in his thick coat and rugs, leaned back in his seat, with both windows down, feeling an inexpressible relief in the sharp sting of the night air, the flakes of snow and little clouds of rain blown every now and then through the open windows. He was free at last from the hateful environment of the last few months. No longer was there anyone to point him out as the man who had sold for a million pounds a mine which had never belonged to him.

Save for the two motionless figures in front, he was alone. There was no one to ask him wearisome questions, no one to offer him sympathy or wish him good-fortune. On they sped through the night, till the villages were like dead haunts, without a light in the windows, and only an occasional lamp-post to mark the place where men slumbered. They pa.s.sed through a town, which was like a city of the dead, and on again to the wilder country, where the rabbits rushed, terrified, before the streaming lights of the car, and the wind alone, of all Nature's voices, seemed left to remind him that this was not a world of ghosts through which he rushed.

Presently he saw the man at the wheel swerve a little in his seat, and he lifted the speaking-tube to his lips. "Can we get through to Rakney, Murray," he asked him, "or shall we stop at King's Lynn?"

"We can get through, sir," the man replied, "if we can rest for half-an-hour somewhere."

They knocked up an inn-keeper in King's Lynn, and the two men ate and drank. Deane himself drank a long whiskey and soda, and lit a cigar.

Then they rushed onward into the darkness, already lightening a little in the east. Dawn was breaking as they climbed their last hill and ran down toward the marshlands. A red light loomed over the gray, sullen sea. The marshes themselves seemed heavy and undistinguishable--patches of land and dark creeks of salt-water running into one another. Out in the bay the foam-topped breakers came rolling sullenly in. When at last they turned through the gate, and went slowly up the rough road--marked out with white stakes--which led up to the tower, the dawn had actually come, the night was a thing of the past, although its shadow seemed to hang low over the gray land. The sea had been lately over the rough road, and progress was difficult. At last, though, they reached the little bank of shingle on which the tower was built, and Deane, with a little sigh of relief, stepped wearily down. While his servant unlocked the front door and busied himself arranging a bed and lighting a fire, Deane walked down to the edge of the sea, whose white-topped waves were dragging back the shingle as they fell and broke, with a dull, grinding noise. Never, it seemed to him, had the beauty of loneliness appealed to him more strongly than at this hour of dawn. The birds were silent, the wind had fallen, there was no sound whatever from the sleeping land.

Only the eternal breaking of the waves continued--a sound which was more like the background for stillness, grim and mysterious, inevitable as existence itself. Far away now seemed that crowded court, with its eager faces, its rapt issues,--far away seemed the importance of wealth, the great question whether he should remain amongst the millionaires--the world buyers, or take his place amongst the poor men of the earth. What did it matter, after all, this kingship of the cities, with their lack of perspective, their crowded hours, their strange, artificial atmosphere? The value of these things was, grotesque, for a moment,--distorted. He had been wise to come here, he told himself, as a breath of the morning wind stole, faint and fresh, across the salt sea.

Perhaps he would be wiser still if he defied fortune and stayed here always.

His servant summoned him, and he went reluctantly indoors. He ate some biscuits and drank some milk. Then, as the real dawn broke over the sea, a fiery red, and with many suggestions of troubled weather in its angry glow, he opened the window and threw himself upon the little iron bedstead with its lavender-scented sheets.

CHAPTER XXI

ALL AS IT SHOULD BE

There was one person in London who knew Deane's whereabouts, and from him there came no word. To Deane himself there seemed something unreal about the long hours which he spent in solitude, wandering along the sea front, following the sands left by the receding tide--himself a lonely figure on the great gray plain. A storm of rain once blew in from the sea, but mostly the day was still and colorless. To Deane, after the long hours in the crowded courts, his directors' meetings, his self-imposed mask of ease and confidence, the relief of this absolute solitude was immeasurable. It was just the season of the year when nature and those who minister to her seem alike to sleep. It was too early for any thought of spring; the storms of autumn lay behind. A certain quietness seemed to hang over the land, as though, indeed, sea and resisting sands were exhausted with the long struggle of the winter.

Towards afternoon came some few moments of flickering sunlight. Deane sat on a wooden bar on the top of one of the d.y.k.es, and above his head a lark was singing, a little timidly, a little doubtful, even, of his lonely music, but still lending a note of real life to the still, gray world over which he hovered. Deane looked at the queer stone tower on its bank of shingle, and blessed the chance which had led him to purchase it. He looked inland to the little red-tiled village, to the deserted quay, from which all the fishing-boats had been dragged high and dry along the straight line of raised d.y.k.e which formed the footpath between him and the village. As he looked, he became conscious that someone had started out from the village along the d.y.k.e top. Far away at the other end he could see a slowly approaching figure. His heart gave a little beat. Was it a messenger at last, coming to bring him his fate?

He looked up again to where the lark was singing. It seemed, after all, so small a thing! Nearer and nearer the figure came, near enough, at last, for Deane to be able to distinguish something of its outline. Then he rose to his feet with a quick indrawn breath--a little cry of surprise to which there was no one to listen. For this was no messenger from the village coming. It was a girl in a long gray cloak, and a hat which she carried in her hand, as though the fresh salt air of the marshes was something also to her. Deane saw the neatly arranged brown hair blown into confusion about her face. Against the empty background he recognized the poise of her head, the firm but delicate walk, the slender, swaying figure. He knew who it was that came, and it seemed to him that from that moment he knew, too, other things! His sense of proportions was suddenly shifted,--enlarged, perhaps,--altered certainly. He understood things which before had been mysteries to him.

He understood, as though in some moment of inspiration, that riches or poverty, life, even, or death, are the incidents of life before its greatest truths. Nothing that he could think of seemed able to hold his thoughts. His heart was beating to music, the lark was singing to him a song of her own--singing in weak, tremulous notes a song of life and love and pa.s.sion! He rose to his feet and went to meet her. She stopped short and faltered for a moment. He hurried on.

"Winifred!" he exclaimed.

She held out her hands. Her eyebrows were upraised, her mouth was quivering, her eyes were seeking his with a sort of plaintive earnestness. "It is true, then!" she exclaimed. "You are really here!"

"I am really here," he answered, "and it is really you! Nothing else seems to matter very much,--and yet, I would like to know why you alone, of all the world, should have discovered my hiding place."

She laughed, and seemed quite unconscious of the fact that he was still holding her hands. "I have been ill," she said. "I came down here to rest. Last night I heard in the village that you had arrived, that you were here alone. I knew then," she continued softly, "what had happened.

I felt that I must come, if it was only for a few moments."

"It was very nice of you," he said.

Then they stood side by side in a silence charged with a sort of impotent pa.s.sion. Why had she troubled to come, he wondered, now that the bubble of his wealth was burst,--she, who had held him to her cold-blooded compact, who had bound him to her by as sordid a bargain as ever the mind of woman could have conceived.

"I am glad to see you," he said, "and yet I don't know why. You did not hesitate to leave me without word of you, as soon as you saw the breakers ahead."

She drew a little away, looking at him as though she had only half understood. "When I lost the bond by which I held you," she said, "I could scarcely expect you to continue to pay. I have thought it all over since, until I think that I have drunk in all the shame which a woman could feel. It was a hateful, miserable thing, but then my life has been a hateful, miserable thing ever since I was a child, and I did long, yes, I did long," she added fervently, "for something a little different."

"You disappeared, then," he said slowly, "because you imagined, naturally enough, that so soon as you had lost your hold upon me, I should be only too glad to free myself from our engagement?"

"Of course," she answered, the color slowly staining her cheeks. "There was no doubt whatever about that. Only since then I have understood how great a mistake I made. If things had turned out differently," she continued, "I should never have dared to come to you, to tell you this and to ask for your forgiveness. But as it is," she added, "you cannot misunderstand me any longer, can you?"

"I suppose not," he admitted.

"I wanted to come and tell you that I was sorry," she continued softly, "and I wanted, too, to remind you that you are still young, and that the loss of a fortune is not the most terrible thing in the world. I heard yesterday that you were out upon Salthouse Neck, close to the quicksands. You know it is never safe there, with these winter tides.

Life is not a thing to be trifled with. It may seem terrible to you just now to have lost your great fortune, to be once more a poor man. These things, after all, don't count for much against the gift of life. I know it sounds like humbug to hear me talk like this, but they were gossiping about you in the village. One man was saying that he shouldn't be at all surprised to hear that you had disappeared, and to find--to find--" she added, with a little shiver, "your body come up the creek with the next tide. You wouldn't do anything like that, would you?"

"Not a ghost of a chance of it," he answered cheerily. "Besides, I am not quite a pauper yet."

"You have lost the case, haven't you?" she asked quickly. "They seemed to think so in the village, and I heard that Mr. Sarsby said his niece had come into a million pounds."

"Up till last night, at any rate," answered Deane, "nothing was decided.

The judge reserved his decision."

"Then why," she asked wonderingly, "did you come down here?"

He drew her a little closer to him, and looked into her eyes. "I think, dear," he said, "that it was Providence which sent me."

They walked along the sands, and for them the sun shone still, and the song of the lark was only the faint echo of a still more wonderful music. And then, as they turned back, they saw along the d.y.k.e a boy riding a bicycle, a boy with a leather satchel around his waist, and the rim of whose bicycle was red. He pressed her arm.

"Courage, dear," he said. "This is the Mercury who brings us the knowledge of our fate. In a few moments you will know whether you are to become the wife of a millionaire or a working man."

"If you would only believe," she murmured, "how little it matters!"

"I do believe," he answered. "I came down here, for one reason, to escape the shock of hearing the news before others. Now that it comes, I simply do not mind. There are greater things in the world than the Little Anna Gold-Mine!"

He took the telegram from the boy, and opened it with firm fingers. He read it out aloud without a tremor:

Counsel met in judge's private room by appointment to-day. Have compromised with plaintiffs twenty thousand pounds.

Deane threw a coin to the boy, who remounted his bicycle and rode away.

Then, turning to Winifred, "You see," he said, "you have brought me luck."

"I only pray," she murmured, as they turned together toward the tower, "that I may bring you happiness!"

Deane met Mrs. Hefferom a few months afterwards, and was struck at once by her altered expression. They came face to face at the corner of a street, and both involuntarily stopped.

"I hope," said Deane, politely, "that you are making good use of my money."

"And I hope," she answered, laughing, "that you are making more fortunes from my mine."

"I am doing fairly well, thank you," Deane admitted, "but you know that I have a wife to keep now."

"And I a husband," she answered. "I am trying to reform Stephen Hefferom."

"I hope that you are succeeding?"

"On the whole, yes!" she declared, smiling. "We live at Streatham, and he goes in to the city every day. He has bought a share in a business.