She looked, from the mere glimpses I could get of her, somewhere about five-and-twenty, making due allowance for the wear of suffering so evident even in those glimpses. I think she might have been beautiful if the waste of her history could have been restored. That she had had at least some advantages of education, was evident from both her tone and her speech. But oh, the wild eyes, and the tortured lips, drawn back from the teeth with an agony of hopelessness, as she struggled anew, perhaps mistrusting them, to escape from the great arms that held her!
'But the river cannot drown you,' Falconer said. 'It can only stop your breath. It cannot stop your thinking. You will go on thinking, thinking, all the same. Drowning people remember in a moment all their past lives. All their evil deeds come up before them, as if they were doing them all over again. So they plunge back into the past and all its misery. While their bodies are drowning, their souls are coming more and more awake.'
'That is dreadful,' she murmured, with her great eyes fixed on his, and growing steadier in their regard. She had ceased to struggle, so he had slackened his hold of her, and she was leaning back against the fence.
'And then,' he went on, 'what if, instead of closing your eyes, as you expected, and going to sleep, and forgetting everything, you should find them come open all at once, in the midst of a multitude of eyes all round about you, all looking at you, all thinking about you, all judging you? What if you should hear, not a tumult of voices and noises, from which you could hope to hide, but a solemn company talking about you—every word clear and plain, piercing your heart with what you could not deny,—and you standing naked and shivering in the midst of them?'
'It is too dreadful!' she cried, making a movement as if the very horror of the idea had a fascination to draw her towards the realization of it. 'But,' she added, yielding to Falconer's renewed grasp, 'they wouldn't be so hard upon me there. They would not be so cruel as men are here.'
'Surely not. But all men are not cruel. I am not cruel,' he added, forgetting himself for a moment, and caressing with his huge hand the wild pale face that glimmered upon him as it were out of the infinite night—all but swallowed up in it.
She drew herself back, and Falconer, instantly removing his hand, said,
'Look in my face, child, and see whether you cannot trust me.'
As he uttered the words, he took off his hat, and stood bare-headed in the moon, which now broke out clear from the clouds. She did look at him. His hair blew about his face. He turned it towards the wind and the moon, and away from her, that she might be undisturbed in her scrutiny. But how she judged of him, I cannot tell; for the next moment he called out in a tone of repressed excitement,
'Gordon, Gordon, look there—above your head, on the other bridge.'