Part 18 (1/2)

And she left the room.

But she had no sooner gone than there came before my eyes the insupportable picture of a slim figure walking along the sands stooping to look at some object among the _debris_, standing aghast at the sight of her dead father with the evidence of his hideous crime on his own breast; there came the sound of a cry to 'Henry' for help! I beat my head against the bedstead till I was nearly stunned.

I yelled and bellowed like a maniac: 'Mother, come back!'

When she returned to my bedside my eyes were glaring so that my mother stood appalled, and (as she afterwards owned to me) was nearly yielding her point.

'Mother,' I said,'I consent to your condition: I will give her up--but oh, save her! Let there be no dallying, let there be no risk, mother. Let nothing prevent your going upon the sands in the morning--early, quite early--and every morning at the ebbing of the tide.'

'I will keep my word,' she said.

'You will use the fullest and best means to save her?'

'I will keep my word,' she said, and left the room.

'I have saved her!' I cried over and over again, as I sank back on my pillow. Then the delirium of fever came upon me, and I lay tossing as upon a sea of fire.

XII

Weak in body and in mind as an infant, I woke again to consciousness.

Through the open window the sunlight, with that tender golden-yellow tone which comes with morning in England, was pouring between the curtains, and illuminating the white counterpane. Then a soft breeze came and slightly moved the curtains, and sent the light and shadows about the bed and the opposite wall--a breeze laden with the scent I always a.s.sociated with Wynne's cottage, the scent of geraniums. I raised myself on my elbows, and gazed over the geraniums on the window-sill at the blue sky, which was as free of clouds as though it were an Italian one, save that a little feathery cloud of a palish gold was slowly moving towards the west.

'It is shaped like a hand,' I said dreamily, and then came the picture of Winifred in the churchyard singing, and pointing to just such a golden cloud, and then came the picture of Tom Wynne reeling towards us from the church porch, and then came everything in connection with him and with her; everything down to the very last words which I had spoken about her to my mother before unconsciousness had come upon me. But what I did _not_ know--what I was now burning to know without delay--was what time had pa.s.sed since then.

I called out 'Mother!' A nurse, who was sitting in the room, but hidden from me by a large carved and corniced oak wardrobe, sprang up and told me that she would go and fetch my mother.

'Mother,' I said, when she entered the room, 'you've been?'

'Yes,' said she, taking a seat by my bedside, and motioning the nurse to leave us.

'And you were in time, mother!'

'More than in time,' said she. 'There was nothing to do. I have realised, however, that your extraordinary and horrible story was true. It was not a fever-dream. The tomb has been desecrated.'

'But, mother, you went as you promised to the sands in Church Cove, and you waited for the ebb of the tide?'

'I did.'

'And you found--'

'Nothing; no corpse exposed.'

'And you went again the next day?'

'I did.'

'And you found--'

'Nothing.'