The post-girl

by Edward Charles Booth

"When you get this..." he read. Ah! that familiar, time-worn overture for stricken messages of grief. How many miserables, by water-sides, by lone lochs, by canals, reservoirs, and railways, have prefaced their journey to eternity with these four words. Scarcely a suicide so unliterary that, at this last moment, he cannot call them to his aid for epitaph to his misery. As soon as the schoolmaster read them, he knew all. Death or departure ... this was the end.

"... When you get this" (he read), "I shall be far away from Ullbrig, and you will know why. If you had done differently with me, I might have done differently with you. But it is too late now for regrets. After the sin you have forced me to share with you, I could never, never love you. The future frightens me. For all you have made me suffer I forgive you freely, but I pray God we may never meet again. I have been as wicked as you, and for this reason I dare not join our wickednesses, for fear of where they may lead us. Please forgive me for the things in which I have sinned against you, and beg God to forgive us both for the things we have done against Him. Pray for me too, as I will pray for you. Perhaps your life may be all the brighter and better for my absence. Strive to do your best that it may be so; and please remember, if at any time you are tempted to think hardly upon me, that I am not angry with you, and that I do not blame you. Good-by for ever. PAM."

That was all the letter told him—but it was enough. His face was like the face of a snow-man when he had finished reading. Not only was he smitten to the heart with the lost love of the girl, after all his lavish outlay of unrighteousness and sin, but now she was gone, and he was here in Ullbrig to bear the brunt of his deed. For he had no misconceptions as to his true position in the matter, as Pam had. He knew his conduct for what it was, and his hold over her for what it was, and the world's judgment for what it would be. Her very going was a declaration of the thing he had held over her in his wickedness, and would have never dared employ. The worthless blackmail with which he had threatened her had served its purpose only too well. To such extent had the girl believed its power and feared it, and accredited him with the intentions of its use, that she had been terrorised into flight from him. And now the full responsibility of his act pointed at him with awful finger. To-morrow, tidings of the girl's departure would be out. Tongues would be busy. She who had been going to wed the schoolmaster had loved him so little that she had fled from him. Why had she fled from him? Because he had held a letter over her head that he had robbed from her desk—a letter belonging to neither of them—and by withholding it from its proper owner, and threatening the girl, he had got her to submit to his terms. When once that became known he was a ruined man. His love was ruined; his life was ruined. The death that had so terrorised him already must have been none other than his own. For rather than face this terrible exposure and degradation, he would die. He was a wild and desperate man now, holding the slipping cable of life and honor in his hands. To avert this catastrophe, to find the girl—at scarcely anything would he stop short. But what must he do? Where seek her? How act?

To cast his eye on the second letter was to seize upon it as he had done the first, and tear open its contents without a moment's hesitation. Emma Morland would never know what had been left for her this night, and beneath this envelope there might lurk a confession of the whole history of the girl's departure, with his own share writ incriminatingly large; at the least, some word or sentence that might give him a clearer clue to her intentions than her own letter to him. But he was disappointed. Beyond beginning: "Dearest Emma," this second epistle told him nothing that he consumed to know. It was a mere farewell of sorrow for all the sin Pam had committed against Emma, particularly during these last few days, and a pathetic begging for forgiveness. Emma did not know how unhappy Pam had been—Pam hoped Emma would never, never know such unhappiness. She was not the girl Emma thought her. She was a living lie, full of wickedness and deception. The only thing for her to do, she felt, was to blot out such a horrible lie from the face of Ullbrig and be gone. Then followed assurances of undying love to Emma, and to the postmaster and to Mrs. Morland, with a list of such things as Pam bequeathed to Emma for her own use and possession. To all intents and purposes, it was Pam's last will and testament, pathetically worded enough, had the man been in any mood for pathos other than his own. To the postmaster, Pam left this; to Mrs. Morland, that; to James Maskill, the other; to Ginger—if he would have it—some further token of her affection. Only the schoolmaster's name was absent. And at the end was Pam's own name, blurred and spotted with the tears that had fallen fast at this juncture.

But for these the man had no heed. He had read the letters, and they had told him nothing; now he must decide quickly, as he valued his life.

And first, he could accomplish nothing as he was. The remembrance of his ungarbed condition came upon him suddenly, and he cursed himself for his bodily unreadiness—although his mind had as yet no commission for his limbs to execute. Up the twisted staircase he pattered again, employing his hands on the steps in front of him like paws, to accelerate his pace, and thrust himself wildly into his clothes. Then he scurried down again to the little kitchen. There he sorted his own boots from the disorderly gathering for the morning's clean, strapped up their leather laces with the speed of desperation, stuffed the two letters into his coat pocket, caught a cap from the row of pegs where the postmaster's official regalia hung, and scuffled down the passage to the front door.

There was no mistaking signs of the girl's flight, or the way by which she had fled. For him there was no necessity to work back the big square bolt, or turn the traitorous key. Pam's fingers had done that service already. He was out in the street with scarcely a moment's delay, on the whitewashed step where Pam's own feet had rested less than fifteen minutes ago—could he only have known—closing the door upon him by stealth, as she had done, and looking up and down the roadway, divided lengthways between its far white band of moonlight and its nearer black shadow, with its serrated line of broken roofs and chimney-pots—like the keyboard of a piano—as she had looked before her purpose made its final plunge.

Which way had she gone? he asked himself, in frenzied supplication. For all he knew, she had been gone an hour, a couple of hours, three hours ... four hours. Even now, while he was making this vein-bursting struggle to come abreast with her and stave off that awful exposure of to-morrow, it might all be ended. Destiny might have this shameful history written to the full in the book of record, and the book inexorably closed. Perhaps the girl's purpose had been maturing all these days past. Perhaps her plan had been prepared from the first ... and in abeyance, pending restitution of the letter. Fool that he was ever to give it! Why had n't he adhered to his first project, and given it to her only when they were in sight of the house, and he was with her, or left it there himself by night, with a message that it had been overlooked in a corner of the post-bag? Now what had she done with it? Had she restored it? That would mean the Cliff Wrangham road she must have taken. Or had she fled with it, bearing all traces of her guilt with her? That might mean any road ... the Hunmouth road, the Garthston road, the Merensea road. Or had she gone to cast herself upon the protection of the Vicar? Accursed old busybody! who had drilled and questioned and cross-examined him about the wedding like a school-thief under suspicion. There was probability about this latter surmise, and at least, to put the speculation to the test would not take him far out of his way. Full of the wild, unrestrained desire to do something, with tumultuous, incredulous hope in the desire, he quitted his place on the doorstep, and set off in madman's haste for the Vicarage.

But the moon poured down in sublime, unpitying indifference upon its unlighted windows. The house was as still and unawake as the church at its side and the white graves beyond. Baffled, he stood and glared hatefully, with his hands twitching about the upturned collar of his coat, and his face working as though the house were human and he would have throttled it. Of all men in the world to help him, here, behind these luminous opal windows, was the man, and he knew it, and was powerless to evoke his assistance, grinding his teeth together in the fierce agony of despair.

Motion took him in the legs again, and drove him down the narrow, crooked side-street towards the low road and Merensea Hill, between the rows of tumbled cottages, with their yellow window squares. He could have drummed on them with his fingers, and in his desperation and need of assistance would have done so, but fear withheld him. As he ran, he heard troubled night-coughs rap out sharp at him here and there, where some aged sufferer drew breath badly, and wrestled for such stagnant air as was contained in the sealed chamber. The buzzing of some big eight-day clock, too, chiming a belated hour, he heard, and the fretful crying of a baby, being lulled to sleep by its weary mother. Heaven knows where his run would have ended in this direction, for it was become so blended and amalgamated with his consciousness that he could have as soon stopped running as the feverish urging of his thoughts. But at the bottom of the street, where the road dips its lowest before making the sharp ascent of Merensea Hill, he saw the dark figure of a man, and death could not have stopped him sooner. It was only Bob Newbit, smoking his black cutty, with his hands in his belt, and a coat thrown over his shoulders, come out to watch over the fire of the brick-kiln that glowed red in the field across the roadway, but all men were one man in their power to read the schoolmaster's dark secret, and do him harm. He saw the burning end of the cutty turn his way, and without waiting to know whether he had been perceived, or give the chance of a hail, he turned on his tracks again like a hare, and was forging up the street through the square lighted windows towards the Vicarage.