Quick as the lightning that now and then revealed her way, she darted shoreward, calling out for Elsie as she went; but terror and speed deprived her voice of all power, and she could utter the name of her charge in hoarse whispers only.
As she passed by the cottage, a glare of lightning fell upon her, and through it she saw an open window lighted from within. That same man was framed in the open sash, whose apparition, a few minutes before, had drawn Elsie into the storm.
Was it a real being? Or was it the picture which she had copied in the library? The same proportions were there; the coloring was alike; but this picture looked human. Was it her breathing husband? Or had terror driven her mad also?
She paused a moment, with her face uplifted, wondering if she were mad, or not; if the vision were a hallucination or a reality. The rain beat into her uplifted face, the wind blew fiercely over her thinly clad form. No wonder she seemed ghost-like to the man who saw her from the window.
A voice down toward the water aroused her from this wild trance. She turned and ran toward it, calling aloud “Elsie! oh, Elsie!”
CHAPTER LII.
OUT IN THE STORM.
As Catharine approached the shore, Elsie came toward her, drifting, as it were, like a cloud before the storm. “I have followed him, I caught him; see here!” she cried, with great exultation; “see here! I have torn off her crown; I have rent away her robe; but they are both gone; gone into the depths of the sea; that is the way he treats me; always with her! always with her! and oh, oh! how like a fiend she has grown; she was never handsome, never; but I have disrobed and uncrowned her; see! see!”
As she spoke, Elsie held up the crown of a bonnet, to which a trail of yellow lace was clinging, and a fragment of faded calico. How she had obtained them, Catharine could only conjecture; and she was now too much excited for thought on the subject.
“Oh, Elsie! how you have frightened me; let us go home!” she pleaded, locking her arms with those of the lunatic. “I am wet and cold. Do go home with me, Elsie!”
“Poor child, poor little dear! Cold is it! Elsie is always cold and wet too—wet with her own tears. You see the ocean yonder? it was a dry plain till I wept it full of sorrow; now, see how it heaves and foams, and laughs at the lightning; all the moans lie at the bottom, for it does groan heavily at times. When she went into it, I could hear it sigh and heave and struggle as my heart did when the snake crept around it, tightening and tightening its coils till I was stifled with groans; but the ocean has got her now; I am glad that I gave the brave old ocean so many tears. They have drowned her at last; I heard them gurgle in her throat. Oh! it was music to hear the strangle. I wish you had heard it—I wish you had heard it!”