Part 25 (1/2)

'Do you have a nice fire there when it's very cold?' she said.

'Yes, Winifred,' I said.

She then sank into silence, while I kept plying her with food.

After she had appeased her hunger she sat looking into the pool, quite unconscious, apparently, of my presence by her side, and lost in a reverie similar to that which I had seen at the cottage.

The form her dementia had taken was unlike anything that I had ever conceived. Madness seemed too coa.r.s.e a word to denote so wonderful and fascinating a mental derangement. Mivart's comparison to a musical-box recurred to me, and seemed most apt. She was in a waking dream. The peril lay in breaking through that dream and bringing her real life before her. There was a certain cogency of dreamland in all she said and did. And I found that she sank into silent reverie simply because she waited, like a person in sleep, for the current of her thoughts to be directed and dictated by external phenomena. As she sat there gazing in the pool, her hand gradually warming between my two hands, I felt that never when sane, never in her most bewitching moments, had she been so lovable as she was now. This new kind of spell she exercised over me it would be impossible to describe. But it sprang from the expression on her face of that absolute freedom from all self-consciousness which is the great charm in children, combined with the grace and beauty of her own matchless girlhood. A desire to embrace her, to crush her to my breast, seized me like a frenzy.

'Winifred,' I said, 'you are very cold.'

But she was now insensible to sound. I knew from experience now that I must shake her to bring her back to consciousness, for evidently, in her fits of reverie, the sounds falling upon her ear were not conveyed to the brain at all.

I shook her gently, and said, 'The Prince of the Mist.'

She started back to life. My idea had been a happy one. My words had at once sent her thoughts into the right direction for me.

'Pardon me, Prince,' said she, smiling; 'I had forgotten that you were here.'

'Winifred, I've warmed this hand, now give me the other.'

She stretched her other hand across her breast and gave it to me.

This brought her entire body close to me, and I said, 'Winnie, you are cold all over. Won't you let the Prince of the Mist put his arms round you and warm you?'

'Oh, I should like it so much,' she said. 'But are you warm, Prince?

are you really warm?--your mist is mostly very cold.'

'Quite warm, Winifred,' I said, as with my heart swelling in my breast, and with eyelids closing over my eyes from very joy, I drew her softly upon my breast once more.

'Yes--yes,' I murmured, as the tears gushed from my eyes and dropped upon the soft hair that I was kissing. 'If G.o.d will but let me have her _thus_! I ask for nothing better than to possess a maniac.'

As we sat locked in each other's arms the head of Sinfi appeared round the eastern cliff of the gorge where I had first seen Winifred.

The Gypsy had evidently been watching us from there. I perceived that she was signalling to me that I was not to grasp Winifred. Then I saw Sinfi suddenly and excitedly point to the sky over the rock beneath which we sat. I looked up. The upper sky above us was now clear of morning mist, and right over our heads, Winifred's and mine, there hung a little morning cloud like a feather of flickering rosy gold. I looked again towards the corner of jutting rock, but Sinfi's head had disappeared.

'Dear Prince,' said Winifred, 'how delightfully warm you are! How kind of you! But are not your arms a little too tight, dear Prince?

Poor Winnie cannot breathe. And this thump, thump, thump, like a--like a--fire-engine--_ah_!'

Too late I knew what my folly had done. The turbulent action of my heart had had a sympathetic effect upon hers. It seemed as if her senses, if not her mind, had remembered another occasion, when, as she was lying in my arms, the beating of my heart had disturbed her.

In one lightning-flash her real life and all its tragedy broke mercilessly in upon her. The idea of the 'Prince of the Mist' fled.

She started up and away from me. The awful mimicry of her father's expression spread over her face. With a yell of 'Fy Nhad,' and then a yell of 'Father!' she darted round the pool, and then, bounding up the rugged path like a chamois, disappeared behind a corner of jutting rock.

At the same moment the head of the Gypsy girl reappeared round the eastern cleft of the gorge. Sinfi came quickly up to me and whispered, 'Don't follow.'

'I will,' I said.

'No, you won't,' said she, seizing my wrist with a grip of iron. 'If you do she's done for. Do you know where she is running to? A couple of furlongs up that path there's another that branches off on the right; it ain't more nor a futt-an'-a-half wide along a precipuss more nor a hundred futt deep. She knows it well. She'll make for that. The cuss is on her wuss nor ever, judgin' from the gurn and the flash of her teeth.'