Then, as if mocking the horrified wretch’s agonizing fears, the fire flares up before the rising morning breeze, and upon the side of a leathern satchel suspended from a bough hard by he reads the name of Claude Angland.
A sickening odour, resembling roasting pork, is beginning to make the air heavy around, and a little pulseless black hand lies cooking on the ashes. But Giles sees nothing with his staring eyeballs but one small, pallid face, that even in the ruddy light of the fire lies white as marble upon the dead body of a ragged-coated dog.
No need for Giles to search for the marks by means of which Billy and Claude had discovered the identity of the long-lost child.
With fearful, awful clearness the distracted man sees his dead wife’s features in those childish ones now gasping at his feet.
A groan bursts from his lips,—the deep moan of a soul too paralyzed with torture to feel further torment for a time.
Raising the child into a sitting posture, Giles madly tries, with shaking fingers, to wipe away the dreadful froth that is oozing from poor Georgie’s mouth.
As he does so, his touch seems to rekindle, for a moment, the waning spark of life within the boy’s fragile frame. The pallid lips open to gasp out their last words on earth, and Giles, bending to catch them, hears Don murmur,—
“Don’t ’it me. Ain’t doin’——”
Then the expression of pain fades off the child’s features, and a smile of peaceful restfulness comes to take its place, as with a sigh the curly head falls back on Giles’s arm, and the spirit takes its flight. And at that moment Giles—as Giles—dies too. His feeble brain, whirling round with a wild and ever wilder rush of fearful changing scenes and thoughts, suddenly breaks down.
A madman lifts the dead child from the ground, and, leaping over stocks and stones with a fearful, ape-like agility, vanishes into the darkness.