Impossible to depict the expression on Vivian Ryecroft's face, as the
words of the waterman fall upon his ear. It is more than surprise--more
than astonishment--intensely interrogative, as though some secret hope
once entertained, but long gone out of his heart, had suddenly returned
to it.
"Still alive!" he exclaims, springing to his feet, and almost upsetting
the table. "Alive!" he mechanically repeats. "What do you mean,
Wingate? And who?"
"My poor girl, Captain. You know."
"_His_ girl, not _mine_! Mary Morgan, not Gwendoline Wynn!" reflects
Ryecroft within himself, dropping back upon his chair as one stunned by
a blow.
"I'm almost sure she be still livin'," continues the waterman, in wonder
at the emotion his words have called up, though little suspecting why.
Controlling it, the other asks, with diminished interest, still
earnestly:--
"What leads you to think that way, Wingate? Have you a reason?"
"Yes, have I; more'n one. It's about that I ha' come to consult ye."
"You've come to astonish me! But proceed!"
"Well, sir, as I ha' sayed, it'll take a good bit o' tellin', and a lot
o' explanation beside. But since ye've signified I'm free to your time,
I'll try and make the story short's I can."
"Don't curtail it in any way. I wish to hear all!"
The waterman thus allowed latitude, launches forth into a full account
of his own life--those chapters of it relating to his courtship of, and
betrothal to, Mary Morgan. He tells of the opposition made by her
mother, the rivalry of Coracle Dick, and the sinister interference of
Father Rogier. In addition, the details of that meeting of the lovers
under the elm--their last--and the sad episode soon after succeeding.
Something of all this Ryecroft has heard before, and part of it
suspected. What he now hears new to him is the account of a scene in
the farm-house of Abergann, while Mary Morgan lay in the chamber of
death, with a series of incidents that came under the observation of her
sorrowing lover. The first, his seeing a shroud being made by the
girl's mother, white, with a red cross, and the initial letters of her
name braided over the breast: the same soon afterwards appearing upon
the corpse. Then the strange behaviour of Father Rogier on the day of
the funeral; the look with which he stood regarding the girl's face as
she lay in her coffin; his abrupt exit out of the room; as afterwards
his hurried departure from the side of the grave before it was finally
closed up--a haste noticed by others as well as Jack Wingate.
"But what do you make of all that?" asks Ryecroft, the narrator having
paused to gather himself for other, and still stranger revelations.
"How can it give you a belief in the girl being still alive? Quite its
contrary, I should say."
"Stay, Captain! There be more to come."
The Captain does stay, listening on. To hear the story of the planted
and plucked up flower; of another and later visit made by Wingate to the
cemetery in daylight, then seeing what led him to suspect, that not only
had the plant been destroyed, but all the turf on the grave disturbed!
He speaks of his astonishment at this, with his perplexity. Then goes
on to give account of the evening spent with Joseph Preece in his new
home; of the waifs and strays there shown him; the counterfeit coins,
burglars' tools, and finally the shroud--that grim remembrancer, which
he recognised at sight!
His narrative concludes with his action taken after, assisted by the old
boatman.
"Last night," he says, proceeding with the relation, "or I ought to say
this same mornin'--for 'twar after midnight hour--Joe an' myself took
the skiff, an' stole up to the chapel graveyard; where we opened her
grave, an' foun' the coffin empty! Now, Captain, what do ye think o'
the whole thing?"
"On my word, I hardly know what to think of it. Mystery seems the
measure of the time! This you tell me of is strange--if not stranger
than any! What are your own thoughts about it, Jack?"
"Well, as I've already sayed, my thoughts be, an' my hopes, that Mary's
still in the land o' the livin'."
"I hope she is."
The tone of Ryecroft's rejoinder tells of his incredulity, further
manifested by his questions following.
"But you saw her in her coffin? Waked for two days, as I understood
you; then laid in her grave? How could she have lived throughout all
that? Surely she was dead!"
"So I thought at the time, but don't now."
"My good fellow, I fear you are deceiving yourself. I'm sorry having to
think so. Why the body has been taken up again is of itself a
sufficient puzzle; but alive--that seems physically impossible!"
"Well, Captain, it's just about the possibility of the thing I come to
ask your opinion; thinkin' ye'd be acquainted wi' the article itself."
"What article?"
"The new medicine; it as go by the name o' chloryform."
"Ha! you have a suspicion--"
"That she ha' been chloryformed, an' so kep' asleep--to be waked up when
they wanted her. I've heerd say, they can do such things."
"But then she was drowned also? Fell from a foot plank, you told me?
And was in the water some time?"
"I don't believe it, a bit. It be true enough she got somehow into the
water, an' wor took out insensible, or rather drifted out o' herself, on
the bank just below, at the mouth o' the brook. But that wor short
after, an' she might still a' ben alive not with standin'. My notion
be, that the priest had first put the chloryform into her, or did it
then, an' knew all along she warn't dead, nohow."
"My dear Jack, the thing cannot be possible. Even if it were, you seem
to forget that her mother, father--all of them--must have been cognisant
of these facts--if facts?"
"I don't forget it, Captain. 'Stead I believe they all wor cognisant o'
them--leastways, the mother."
"But why should she assist in such a dangerous deception--at risk of her
daughter's life?"
"That's easy answered. She did it partly o' herself; but more at the
biddin' o' the priest, whom she daren't disobey--the weak-minded
creature most o' her time given up to sayin' prayers and paternosters.
They all knowed the girl loved me, and wor sure to be my wife, whatever
they might say or do against it. Wi' her willing I could a' defied the
whole lot o' them. Bein' aware o' that their only chance wor to get her
out o' my way by some trick--as they ha' indeed got her. Ye may think
it strange their takin' all that trouble; but if ye'd seen her ye
wouldn't. There worn't on all Wyeside so good lookin' a girl!"
Ryecroft again looks incredulous; not smilingly, but with a sad cast of
countenance.
Despite its improbability, however, he begins to think there may be some
truth in what the waterman says--Jack's earnest convictions
sympathetically impressing him.
"And supposing her to be alive," he asks, "where do you think she is
now? Have you any idea?"
"I have--leastways a notion."
"Where?"
"Over the water--in France--the town o' Bolone."
"Boulogne!" exclaims the Captain, with a start. "What makes you suppose
she is there?"
"Something, sir, I han't yet spoke to ye about. I'd a'most forgot the
thing, an' might never a thought o't again, but for what ha' happened
since. Ye'll remember the night we come up from the ball, my tellin' ye
I had an engagement the next day to take the young Powells down the
river?"
"I remember it perfectly."
"Well; I took them, as agreed; an' that day we went down's fur's
Chepstow. But they wor bound for the Severn side a duck shootin'; and
next mornin' we started early, afore daybreak. As we were passin' the
wharf below Chepstow Bridge, where there wor several craft lyin' in, I
noticed one sloop-rigged ridin' at anchor a bit out from the rest, as if
about clearin' to put to sea. By the light o' a lamp as hung over the
taffrail, I read the name on her starn, showin' she wor French, an'
belonged to Bolone. I shouldn't ha' thought that anythin' odd, as there
be many foreign craft o' the smaller kind puts in at Chepstow. But what
did appear odd, an' gied me a start too, wor my seein' a boat by the
sloop's side wi' a man in it, who I could a'most sweared wor the Rogue's
Ferry priest. There wor others in the boat besides, an' they appeared
to be gettin' some sort o' bundle out o' it, an' takin' it up the
man-ropes, aboard o' the sloop. But I didn't see any more, as we soon
passed out o' sight, goin' on down. Now, Captain, it's my firm belief
that man must ha' been the priest, and that thing, I supposed to be a
bundle o' marchandise, neyther more nor less than the body o' Mary
Morgan--not dead, but livin'!"
"You astound me, Wingate! Certainly a most singular circumstance!
Coincidence too! Boulogne--Boulogne!"
"Yes, Captain; by the letterin' on her starn the sloop must ha' belonged
there; an' _I'm goin' there myself_."
"I too, Jack! We shall go together!"
Volume Three, Chapter XVI.