I had another dangerous relapse, and was delirious for two days, I
think. When I came to myself, the first words I uttered to Mivart,
whom I found with me, were inquiries about Winifred. He was loth at
first to revive the subject, though he supposed that the effect of
his narrative upon me had arisen partly from my weakness and partly
from what he called his 'sensational way' of telling the story. (My
mother had been very careful to drop no hint of the true state of the
case.) At last, however, Mivart told me all he knew about Winifred,
while I hid my face in my pillow and listened.
'In the seizures (which are recurrent) the girl,' he said, 'mimics
the expression of terror on her father's face. Between the paroxysms
she lapses into a strange kind of dementia. It is as though her own
mind had fled and the body had been entered by the soul of a child.
She will then sing snatches of songs, sometimes in Welsh and
sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a
person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place
before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike
this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem
to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a
watch or a musical box are stopped if it falls.'
He could tell me nothing about her, he said, nor what had become of
her since she had left his hands.
'The parish officer is taking his holiday,' he added. 'I mean to
inquire about her. I wish I could take her to Paris to the
Salpêtrière, where Marini is treating such cases by transmitting
through magnetism the patient's seizure to a healthy subject.'
'Will she recover?'
'Without the Salpêtrière treatment?'
'Will she recover?' I asked, maddened beyond endurance by all this
cold-blooded professional enthusiasm about a case which was simply a
case of life and death to Winnie and me.
'She may, unless the seizures become too frequent for the strength of
the constitution. In that event, of course, she would succumb. She is
entirely harmless, let me tell you.'
He told me that she was at the cottage, where some good soul was
seeing after her.
'I'll get up,' I said, trying to rise.
'Get up!' said the doctor, astonished; 'why do you want to get up?
You are not strong enough to sit in a chair yet.'
This was, alas! but too true, and my great object now was to conceal
my weakness; for I determined to get out as soon as my legs could
carry me, though I should drop down dead on the road.
I gathered from the doctor and the servants that the sacrilege had
now become publicly known, and had caused much excitement. Wynne had
evidently been slightly intoxicated when he committed it, and had
taken no care to conceal the proofs that the grave had been tampered
with. At the inquest the amulet had been identified and claimed by my
mother.
It was some days before I got out, and then I went at once to the
cottage. It was a lovely evening as I walked down Wilderness Road. It
was not till I reached the little garden-gate that I began fully to
feel how weak my illness had left me. The gate was half open, and I
looked over into the garden, which was already forlorn and deserted.
Some instinct told me she was not there. The little flower-beds
looked shaggy, grass-grown, and uncared for. In the centre, among the
geraniums, phlox-beds, and French marigolds, sat a dirty-white hen,
clucking and calling a brood of dirty-white chickens. The
box-bordered gravelled paths, which Wynne, in spite of his
drunkenness, used to keep always so neat, were covered with leaves,
shaken by the wind from the trees surrounding the garden. One of the
dark green shutters was unfastened, and stood out at right-angles
from the wall--a token of desertion. On the diamond panes of the
upper windows, round which the long tendrils of grape-vines were
drooping, the gorgeous sunset was reflected, making the glass gleam
as though a hundred little fires were playing behind it. When I
reached the door, the paint of which seemed far more cracked with the
sun than it had looked a few weeks before, I found on knocking that
the cottage was empty. I did not linger, but went at once into the
town to inquire about her.
In place of giving me the information I was panting for, the whole
town came cackling round me with comments on the organist and the
sacrilege. I turned into the 'Fishing Smack' inn, a likely place to
get what news was to be had, and found the asthmatical old landlord
haranguing some fishermen who were drinking their ale on a settle.
'It's my b'lief,' said the old man, 'that Tom was arter somethink
else besides that air jewelled cross. I'm eighty-five year old come
next Dullingham fair, and I regleck as well as if it wur yisterdy
when resur-rectionin' o' carpuses wur carried on in the old
churchyard jes' like one o'clock, and the carpuses sent up to Lunnon
reg'lar, and it's my 'pinion as that wur part o' Tom's game, dang
'im; and if I'd a 'ad _my_ way arter the crouner's quest, he'd never
a' bin buried in the very churchyard as he went and blast-phemed.'
'Where would you 'a buried 'im, then, Muster Lantoff?' asked a
fisher-boy in a blue worsted jerkin.
'Buried 'im? why, at the cross-ruds, with a hedge-stake through his
guts, to be sure. If there's a penny agin' 'im on that air slate'
(pointing to a slate hung up on the door) 'there must be ten
shillins, dang 'im.'
'You blear-eyed, ignorant old donkey,' I cried, coming suddenly
upon him, 'what do you suppose he could have done with a dead body in
these days? Here's your wretched ten shillings,--for which you'd sell
all the corpses in Raxton churchyard.'
And I gave him half-a-sovereign, feeling, somehow, that I was doing
honour to Winifred.
'Thankee for the money, Mister Hal, anyhow,' said the old creature.
'You was allus a liberal 'un, you was. But as to what Tom could 'a
dun with the carpus, I'm allus heer'd that you may dew anythink
_with_ any-think, if you on'y send it carriage-paid to Lunnon,'
I left the house in anger and disgust. No tidings could I get of
Winifred in Raxton or Graylingham.
By this time I was thoroughly worn out, and obliged to go home. My
anxiety had become nearly insupportable. All night I walked up and
down my bedroom, like a caged animal, cursing Superstition, cursing
Convention, and all the other follies that had combined to destroy
her. It was not till the next day that the true state of the case was
made known to me in the following manner: At the end of the town
lived the widow of Shales, the tailor. Winifred and I had often, in
our childish days, stood and watched old Shales, sitting cross-legged
on a board in the window, at his work, when Winifred would whisper to
me, 'How nice it must be to be a tailor!'
As I passed this shop I now saw that on the same board was sitting a
person in whom Winifred had taken still stronger interest. This was a
diminutive imitation of the deceased, in the person of his
hump-backed son, a little man of about twenty-four, who might, as far
as appearance went, have been any age from twenty to eighty, with a
pale anxious face like his mother's. He was stitching at a coat with,
apparently, the same pair of scissors by his side that used to
delight us two children. Standing by the side of the board, and
looking on with a skilled intelligence shining from her pale eyes,
was Mrs. Shales, with an infant in her arms--a wasted little
grandchild wrapt in a plaid shawl, apparently smoking a chibouque,
but in reality sucking vigorously at the mouthpiece of a baby's
bottle, which it was clasping deftly with its pink little fingers.
Mrs. Shales beckoned me mysteriously into her shop, and then into the
little parlour behind it, where she used to sit and watch the
customers through the green muslin blind of the glass door, like a
spider in its web. Young Shales, who left his board, followed us, and
they then gave me some news that at once decided my course of action.
They told me that one morning, after her frightful shock, Winifred
had encountered Shales, who was taking, a holiday, and employing it
in catching young crabs among the stones. Winifred, who had a great
liking for the hump-backed tailor, had come up to him and talked in a
dazed way. Shales, pitying her condition, had induced her to go home
with him; and then it had occurred to him to go and inquire at the
Hall what suggestion could be made concerning her at a house where
her father had been so well known. He could not see me; I was ill in
bed. He saw my mother, who at once suggested that Winifred should be
taken to Wales, to an aunt with whom, according to Wynne, she had
been living. (No one but myself knew anything of Wynne's affairs, and
my mother, though she had heard of the aunt, had not, as I then
believed, heard of her death.) She proposed that Shales himself
should contrive to take Winifred to Wales. 'She had reasons,' she
said, 'for wishing that Winifred should not be handed over to the
local parish officer.' She offered to pay Shales liberally for going.
_I_, however, was to know nothing of this. Her object, of course,
was to get Winifred out of my way. The aunt's address was furnished
by a Mr. Lacon of Dullingham, an old friend of Wynne's, who also, it
seems, was ignorant of the aunt's death. This aunt, a sister of
Winifred's mother, named Davies, the widow of a sea captain who had
once known better days, resided in an old cottage between Bettws y
Coed and Capel Curig. Shales had found no difficulty in persuading
Winifred to go with him, for she had now sunk into a condition of
dazed stupor, and was very docile.
They started on their long journey across England by rail, and
everything went well till they got into Wales, when Winifred's stupor
seemed to be broken into by the familiar scenery; her wits became
alive again. Then an idea seemed to seize her that she was pursued by
me, as the messenger bearing my dead father's curse. The appearance
of any young man bearing the remotest resemblance to me frightened
her. At last, before they reached Bettws y Coed, she had escaped, and
was lost among the woods. Shales had made every effort to find her,
but without avail, and was compelled at last, by the demands of his
business, to give up the quest. He had returned on the previous
evening, and my mother had enjoined him not to tell me what had been
done, though she seemed much distressed at hearing that Winnie was
lost, and was about to send others into Wales in order to find her,
if possible. Shales, however, had determined to tell me, as the
matter, he said, lay upon his conscience.
On getting this news I went straight home, ordered a portmanteau to
be packed, and placed in it all my ready cash. Before starting I sat
down to write a letter to my uncle. On hearing of my movements, my
mother came to me in great agitation. In her eyes there was that
haggard expression which I thought I understood. Already she had
begun to feel that she and she alone was responsible for whatsoever
calamities might fall upon the helpless deserted girl she had sent
away. Already she had begun to feel the pangs of that remorse which
afterwards stung her so cruelly that not all Winnie's woes, nor all
mine, were so dire as hers. There are some natures that feel
themselves responsible for all the unforeseen, as well as for all the
foreseen, consequences of their acts. My mother was one of these. I
rose as she entered, offered her a seat, and then sat down again.
She inquired whither I was going.
'To North Wales,' I said.
She stood aghast. But she now understood that grief had made me a
man.
'You are going,' said she, 'after the daughter of the scoundrel who
desecrated your father's tomb?'
'I am going after the young lady whom I intend to marry.'
'Wynne's daughter marry my only son! Never!'