THE LONG VOYAGE
She never remembered afterwards how she accomplished the homeward
journey. The rough stones cut her feet again and again, but she never
felt the pain. She went as one who has an urgent mission to perform,
though what that mission was she scarcely knew.
The night--that night of dreadful tragedy--had changed her. Columbine,
the passionate, the impulsive had turned into a being that was foreign
to herself. All the happy girlhood had been stamped out of her as by the
cruel pressure of a hot iron. She had ceased to feel the agony of it;
somehow she did not think that she ever could feel pain again. The nerve
tissues had been destroyed and all vitality was gone. The creature that
passed like a swift shadow through the twilight of the dawn was an old
and withered woman who had lived beyond her allotted time.
She reached the old Ship Inn, meeting no one. She entered by the door of
the conservatory through which she had flitted æons and æons before to
meet her lover. She went to her room and changed into her own clothes.
The suit that had belonged to Rufus so long ago she laid away with an
odd reverence, still scarcely knowing what she did, driven as it were by
a mechanism that worked without any volition of hers.
Then she went to the glass and began to coil up her hair. It was dank
and heavy yet with the seawater, but she wound it about her head without
noticing. The light was growing, and she peered at herself with a
detached sort of curiosity, till something in her own eyes frightened
her, and she turned away.
She went to the window and opened it wide. The sound of the sea yet
filled the world, but it was not so insistent as it had been. The waves,
though mountainous still, were gradually receding from the shore. It was
as though the dawn had come just in time to prevent the powers of
darkness from triumphing.
She heard someone moving in the house and turned back into the room.
Aunt Liza must be told.
Through the spectral dawnlight she went down the stairs and took her way
to the kitchen. The door stood half open; she heard the cheery crackling
of the newly lighted fire before she entered. And hearing it, she was
aware of a great coldness that clung like a chain, fettering her every
movement.
Someone moved as she pushed open the door. An enormous shadow leaped
upon the wall like a fantastic monster of the deep. She recoiled for a
second, then, as if drawn against her will, she entered.
By the ruddy glow of the fire she saw a man's broad-chested figure, she
saw the gleam of tawny hair above a thick bull-neck. He was bending
slightly over the fire at her entrance, but, hearing her, he turned. And
in that moment every numbed nerve in Columbine's body was pierced into
quivering life.
She stood as one transfixed, and he stood motionless also in the
flickering light of the flames, gazing at her with eyes of awful blue
that were as burning spirit. But he spoke not a word--not a word. How
could a dead man speak?
And as they stood thus, facing each other, the floor between them began
suddenly to heave, became a mass of seething billows that rocked her,
caught her, engulfed her. She went down into them, and as the tossing
darkness received her, her last thought was that Rufus had come back
indeed--not to say farewell, but to take her with him on the long
voyage from which there is no return....