“I don’t know; mother told me to say that prayer always,” she said as she curled herself up in her little white bed and shut her eyes.
Florence stood by the window looking out over the garden into the mass of trees that bounded it, under which the level evening light was pouring. If she could only get that letter back to Wyn! only tell him to stop the keepers from minding her foolish talk! With the letter in her pocket, she really did feel a sense of great responsibility; she really did try to think what it would be right to do. She had never felt so serious in her life. Come what come might, she must get at Wyn. She must run home across the forest. Lose her place for it! Perhaps she would; but, if she had lost one place to amuse herself, she could lose another to prevent such dreadful mischief.
“I don’t care,” said Florence, as she had said once before. There was good in her motive now, but it was the old daring, heedless Florence that never stopped to think. She slipped out of the bedroom by an outer door that did not lead through the nursery, downstairs along the passage, out at a side door, open to the summer evening, across the grass of the garden, and right into the wood. She ran on through the band of fir trees that divided Ravenshurst from Ashcroft, and, crossing the stile between the two properties, found herself, though she did not know it, close to the place where the letter had been picked up, and not far from the ash-tree named in it.
Then she began to grow puzzled about the way. The long yellow lines of light faded, the tall trees rustled overhead, the heavy whir and flap of a startled pheasant sounded close at hand. Deadly fear seized on Florence. If she had been frightened in the sunny morning, she was doubly frightened now in the twilight. Besides, it would really get dark soon, and then what would become of her? She had said “I don’t care!” but where was the use of saying “don’t care” to darkness and silence and confusion as to the right way? Should she go back? she knew the way back.
“No,” said Florence to herself, “I may have been a silly to come; but I’ll get that there letter to Wyn if I walk all night. And I’ll not be afraid of the wood. Miss Geraldine ain’t—but oh, dear, I wish I had to go down the broad path in the cemetery at home, all nice and straight, instead. If I go on I’ll have to get somewhere at last!”
Florence knew quite well that she had done a very serious thing, for which she would have to answer, and in the midst of her fear of the solitude came an involuntary fear of the scolding that would meet her arrival anywhere. She had rather enjoyed scolding when she knew she was wrong: why did she dread it when she thought she was right? The wood did grow darker, much darker than Florence had expected, judging by the light that she knew was outside it; and the poor girl’s knees trembled as she hurried along. It was a perfectly formless terror that seized on her; she had had too utterly matter-of-fact a training to fill the wood with any imaginary inhabitants, and she was too old and had too much sense to people it with wolves or bears. It did occur to her that the keepers she had herself stirred up might shoot her through the bushes, and her cheeks tingled at the thought of being seen and recognised by them; while, if she met her Uncle Warren—
“I’ll go through with it—rather than bring my own brother to the gallows,” she thought with a vividness worthy of her Aunt Stroud. But which was the way? what should she do? Florence was so accustomed to trust to her own wits that where her wits were perfectly useless she felt like another person. She did not know the way, she could not get at Wyn, she could not undo the mischief! There was no one to help her! Suddenly there struck into her mind a new thought:
“God.”
Now Florence had never thought about God in her life. She knew about Him: on the very last Sunday before she left Rapley she had answered Miss Mordaunt’s questions about His nature with a glib tongue, but without a trace of reverence in her manner or of awe in her heart. He was everywhere; He could see her in the dark and in the light; He knew her thoughts; He could hear her prayers. Such awful truths had been taught to her, and had been just as much a lesson as the multiplication table. But now, in the greatest need she had ever known, it did suddenly strike Florence that perhaps God would help her if she asked Him. She looked up—up through the dark trees to the pale clear sky above them, and associating praying with nothing but with “saying her prayers,” she began to repeat the childish formulary which she was in the habit of scurrying over every night, and with a sudden thought added the words which little Lily had been taught to say: “Set wrongs right, bring travellers home.”
“Oh, God,” whispered Florence, clasping her hands, “bring me—there! Save them somehow.” Something seemed let loose within her, and for the first time in her life she really prayed. And “Oh say not, dream not,” that those unrealised lessons, that formal habit of prayer, had been hitherto all in vain. How could she have heard without a teacher? There was the knowledge, there was the instinct, so soon as the naughty, graceless girl felt the need.