The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

Abner turned and called her. ‘Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he called. ‘I never heard such a chronic row!’

‘They’re gulls,’ she shouted. Her voice was thin in the mist. ‘Seagulls.’

‘That’s where they must have come from. Off of this water,’ he called.

And she saw, peering in front of her, a ghostly wood of pines and before them a lake of dark water fringed with reeds. The wind swept across it, bending the reeds, breaking the glassy surface into ripples, and rolling milky mist before it. The wind came in gusts, roaring through the trees with a noise that was like that of the sea, and the gulls screamed above them, unseen, as they might have screamed over storm-bound cliffs. She stood with her knees trembling at Abner’s side, and Morgan clutched her hand. She herself felt like a child, lonely, frightened. They stood so quietly together that some of the birds swooped down on to the water as though driven by the wind.

‘Yes, they’re gulls,’ she said. ‘Seagulls. We’re more than fifty miles away from the sea. I don’t understand.’

She laughed nervously. It came to her suddenly that she could go no farther. Her legs could not make a single step. The gulls came dropping down in twos and threes, and settled on the lake. They were smaller than those that she remembered, she thought. They dropped down just like pigeons when you scatter grain.

‘Come on,’ said Abner. ‘It’s near dark.’

But she could not move. The child tugged at her skirt. She felt the tugging in a dream.

‘We can’t stand staring here all night,’ Abner was saying. She was aware of him standing beside her in the dusk, holding Gladys to his breast. She saw the child’s white hands clasped about his neck, as quietly as if she were asleep. She heard him, but could not stir. Then Abner touched her upper arm, and the pressure of his fingers went through her body like fire along a fuse exploding some mine of passion that had lain hidden beneath her long silence. It burned her like flame, burned her and rent her. . . . She trembled and turned on him violently. Words of abuse came tumbling out of her mouth. She did not know or care what she was saying. She lashed him, wildly, desperately. It was he who was to blame for all this trouble, he who had persuaded her to take the children to Bron and allowed her to be insulted in the inn at Redlake; he who had entangled them in the crowd where Gladys’s leg was broken; and now he’d lost them, and brought them to a place where they might all die of cold with his damned foolishness. Some devil inside her brain drove her on, delighting in the vile things she said, raking up little grudges of the past and throwing them in his face, revealing, against her will, such petty miseries as her jealousy of Susie Hind. ‘It’s with her you ought to be,’ she cried, ‘instead of troubling us! That’s where you ought to be! You’d better go on and leave us, Gladys and Morgan and me. You don’t know any more than I do where we are, with the night coming on. We can’t go a step farther, neither me nor Morgan, poor little thing! Oh, go! Go! I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you!’ She threw herself down, exhausted, on the wet grass.

He had stood up to it utterly bewildered. He couldn’t protest, for all her ravings were so childish, so disconnected, so passionately illogical. He simply let her go on until she had finished with him. Then he disengaged Gladys’s arms from his neck and laid her down gently.