Recovering a little, she said to herself some draught must have blown it to. If so, there was much danger that the noise had been heard; but, in any case, there was no time to lose. She glided swiftly to it. She lifted the latch softly—but, horror of horrors! in vain. The door was locked. She was shut out. She must lie or confess! And what lie would serve? Poor Letty! And yet, for all her dismay, her terror, her despair that night, in her innocence, she never once thought of the worst danger in which she stood!
The least perilous, where no safe way was left, would now have been to let the simple truth appear; Letty ought immediately to have knocked at the door, and, should that have proved unavailing, to have broken her aunt's window even, to gain hearing and admittance. But that was just the kind of action of which, truthful as was her nature, poor Letty, both by constitution and training, was incapable; human opposition, superior anger, condemnation, she dared not encounter. She sank, more than half fainting, upon the door-step.
The moment she came to herself, apprehension changed into active dread, rushed into uncontrollable terror. She sprang to her feet, and, the worst thing she could do, fled like the wind after Tom—now, indeed, she imagined, her only refuge! She knew where he had put up his horse, and knew he could hardly take any other way than the foot-path to Testbridge. He could not be more than a few yards ahead of her, she thought. Presently she heard him whistling, she was sure, as he walked leisurely along, but she could not see him. The way was mostly between hedges until it reached the common: there she would catch sight of him, for, notwithstanding the gauzy mist, the moon gave plenty of light. On she went swiftly, still fancying at intervals she heard in front of her his whistle, and even his step on the hard, frozen path. In her eager anxiety to overtake him, she felt neither the chilling air nor the fear of the night and the loneliness. Dismay was behind her, and hope before her. On and on she ran. But when, with now failing breath, she reached the common, and saw it lie so bare and wide in the moonlight, with the little hut standing on its edge, like a ghastly lodge to nowhere, with gaping black holes for door and window, then, indeed, the horror of her deserted condition and the terrors of the night began to crush their way into her soul. What might not be lurking in that ruin, ready to wake at the lightest rustle, and, at sight of a fleeing girl, start out in pursuit, and catch her by the hair that now streamed behind her! And there was the hawthorn, so old and grotesquely contorted, always bringing to her mind a frightful German print at the head of a poem called "The Haunted Heath," in one of her cousin Godfrey's books! It was like an old miser, decrepit with age, pursued and unable to run! Miserable as was her real condition, it was rendered yet more pitiable by these terrors of the imagination. The distant howl of a dog which the moon would not let sleep, the muffled low of a cow from a shippen, and a certain strange sound, coming again and again, which she could not account for, all turned to things unnatural, therefore frightful. Faintly, once or twice, she tried to persuade herself that it was only a horrible dream, from which she would wake in safety; but it would not do; it was, alas! all too real—hard, killing fact! Anyhow, dream or fact, there was no turning; on to the end she must go. More frightful than all possible dangers, most frightful thing of all, was the old house she had left, standing silent in the mist, holding her room inside it empty, the candle burning away in the face of the moon! Across the common she glided like a swift wraith, and again into the shadow of the hedges.
There seems to be a hope as well as a courage born of despair: immortal, yet inconstant children of a death-doomed sire, both were now departing. If Tom had come this way, she must, she thought, have overtaken him long before now! But, perhaps, she had fainted outright, and lain longer than she knew at the kitchen-door; and when she started to follow him, Tom was already at home! Alas, alas! she was lost utterly!
The footpath came to an end, and she was on the high-road. There was the inn where Tom generally put up! It was silent as the grave. The clang of a horseshoe striking a stone came through the frosty air from far along the road. Her heart sank into the depths of the infinite sea that encircles the soul, and, for the second time that night, Death passing by gave her an alms of comfort, and she lay insensible on the border of the same highway along which Tom, on his bay mare, went singing home.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MORNING.
At Thornwick, Tom had been descried in the yard, by the spying organs of one of the servants—a woman not very young, and not altogether innocent of nightly interviews. Through the small window of her closet she had seen, and having seen she watched—not without hope she might be herself the object of the male presence, which she recognized as that of Tom Helmer, whom almost everybody knew. In a few minutes, however, Letty appeared behind him, and therewith a throb of evil joy shot through her bosom: what a chance! what a good joke! what a thing for her to find out Miss Letty; to surprise her naughty secret! to have her in her power! She would have no choice but tell her everything—and then what privileges would be hers! and what larks they two would have together, helping each other! She had not a thought of betraying her: there would be no fun in that! not the less would she encourage a little the fear that she might, for it would be as a charm in her bosom to work her will withal!—To make sure of Letty and her secret, partly also in pure delight of mischief, and enjoyment of the power to tease, she stole down stairs, and locked the kitchen door—the bolt of which, for reasons of her own, she kept well oiled; then sat down in an old rocking-chair, and waited—I can not say watched, for she fell fast asleep. Letty lifted the latch almost too softly for her to have heard had she been awake; but on the door-step Letty, had she been capable of listening, might have heard her snoring.
When the young woman awoke in the cold gray of the morning, and came to herself, compunction seized her. Opening the door softly, she went out and searched everywhere; then, having discovered no trace of Letty, left the door unlocked, and went to bed, hoping she might yet find her way into the house before Mrs. Wardour was down.
When that lady awoke at the usual hour, and heard no sound of stir, she put on her dressing-gown, and went, in the anger of a housekeeper, to Letty's room: there, to her amazement and horror, she saw the bed had lain all the night expectant. She hurried thence to the room occupied by the girl who was the cause of the mischief. Roused suddenly by the voice of her mistress, she got up half awake, and sleepy-headed; and, assailed by a torrent of questions, answered so, in her confusion, as to give the initiative to others: before she was well awake, she had told all she had seen from the window, but nothing of what she had herself done. Mrs. Wardour hurried to the kitchen, found the door on the latch, believed everything and much more, went straight to her son's room, and, in a calm rage, woke him up, and poured into his unwilling ears a torrent of mingled fact and fiction, wherein floated side by side with Letty's name every bad adjective she could bring the lips of propriety to utter. Before he quite came to himself the news had well-nigh driven him mad. There stood his mother, dashing her cold hailstorm of contemptuous wrath on the girl he loved, whom he had gone to bed believing the sweetest creature in creation, and loving himself more than she dared show! He had been dreaming of her with the utmost tenderness, when his mother woke him with the news that she had gone in the night with Tom Helmer, the poorest creature in the neighborhood.
"For God's sake, mother," he cried, "go away, and let me get up!"