“What a clumsy fool! All my fault, my own stupidity!” He groaned when he crossed the bridge at the half distance. He halted there: “It’s dreadful, dreadful!” A tremor in his blood, the shame of his foolishness, the fear of catastrophe, all urged him to turn back to the station and hasten away from these miserable complications.
But he did not do so, for across the marshes at the foot of the uplands he saw the horse and trap coming back furiously towards him. Orianda was driving it.
“What has happened?” she cried, jumping from the trap. “O, what fear I was in, what’s happened?” She put her arms around him tenderly.
“And I was in great fear,” he said with a laugh of relief. “What has happened?”
“The horse came home, just trotted up to the door and stood still. Covered with sweat and foam, you see. The trap was empty. We couldn’t understand it, anything, unless you had been flung out and were bleeding on the road somewhere. I turned the thing back and came on at once.” She was without a hat; she had been anxious and touched him fondly. “Tell me what’s the scare?”
He told her all.
“But Lizzie was not in the trap,” Orianda declared excitedly. “She has not come back. What does it mean, what does she want to do? Let us find her. Jump up, Gerald.”
Away they drove again, but nobody had seen anything of Lizzie. She had gone, vanished, dissolved, and in that strong warm air her soul might indeed have been blown to Paradise. But they did not know how or why. Nobody knew. A vague search was carried on in the afternoon, guarded though fruitless enquiries were made, and at last it seemed clear, tolerably clear, that Lizzie had conquered her mad impulse or intention or whatever it was, and walked quietly away across the fields to a station in another direction.
V
For a day or two longer time resumed its sweet slow delightfulness, though its clarity was diminished and some of its enjoyment dimmed. A village woman came to assist in the mornings, but Orianda was now seldom able to leave the inn; she had come home to a burden, a happy, pleasing burden, that could not often be laid aside, and therefore a somewhat lonely Loughlin walked the high and the low of the country by day and only in the evenings sat in the parlour with Orianda. Hope too was slipping from his heart as even the joy was slipping from his days, for the spirit of vanished Lizzie, defrauded and indicting, hung in the air of the inn, an implacable obsession, a triumphant forboding that was proved a prophecy when some boys fishing in the mill dam hooked dead Lizzie from the pool under the hornbeam tree.