Very different were the thoughts that during that walk back agitated the mind of the younger girl. Her whole nature was obsessed by one fierce resolve, the resolve to escape at once to the arms of her lover. He was waiting for her; he was expecting her; she felt absolutely convinced of that. An indefinable pain in her breast and a throbbing in her heart assured her that he was watching, waiting, drawing her towards him. The same large influences of the night, the same silent spaces, the same starlit dome, which brought to Nance her spiritual reassurance, brought to the frailer figure she supported only a desperate craving.
She could feel through every nerve of her feverish body the touch of her love’s fingers. She ached and shivered with pent-up longing, with longing to yield herself to him, to surrender herself absolutely into his power. She was no longer a thing of body, soul, and senses. The normal complexity of our mortal frame was annihilated in her. She was one trembling, quivering, vibrant chord, a chord of feverish desire, only waiting to break into one wild burst of ecstatic music, when struck by the hand she loved.
Her desire at that moment was of the kind which tears at the root of every sort of scruple. It did not only endow her with the courage of madness, it inspired her with the cunning of the insane. All the way along the embankment she was devising desperate plans of escape, and by the time they reached the church path these plans had shaped themselves into a definite resolution.
They emerged upon the familiar way and turned southward towards the bridge. Nance, thankful that she had got her sister so near home without any serious mishap, could not resist, in the impulse of her relief, the pleasure of stopping for a moment to pick a bunch of flowers from the path’s reedy edge. The coolness of the earth as she stooped, the waving grasses, the strongly blowing, marsh-scented wind, the silence and the darkness, all blent harmoniously together to strengthen her in her new-found comfort.
She pulled up impetuously, almost by their roots, great heavy-flowered stalks of loose-strife and willow-herb. She scrambled down into the wet mud of a shallow ditch to add to her bunch a tall spray of hemp-agrimony and some wild valerian. All these things, ghostly and vague and colourless in the faint starlight, had a strange and mystic beauty, and as she gathered them Nance promised herself that they should be a covenant between her senses and her spirit; a sign and a token, offered up in the stillness of that hour, to whatever great invisible powers still made it possible on earth to renounce and be not all unhappy. She returned with her flowers to her sister’s side and together they reached the bridge.
When they were at the very centre of this, Linda suddenly staggered and swayed. She tore herself from her sister’s support and sank down on the little stone seat beneath the parapet—the same stone seat upon which, some months before, that passage of sinister complicity had occurred between Rachel Doorm and Brand. Falling helplessly back now in this place, the young girl pressed her hands to her head and moaned pitifully.
Nance dropped her flowers and flung herself on her knees beside her. “What is it, darling?” she whispered in a low frightened voice. “Oh, Linda, what is it?” But Linda’s only reply was to close her eyes and let her head fall heavily back against the stone-work of the parapet. Nance rose to her feet and stood looking at her in mute despair. “Linda! Linda!” she cried. “Linda! What is it?”
But the shadowy white form lay hushed and motionless, the soft hair across her forehead stirring in the wind, but all else about her, horribly, deadly still.
Nance rushed across the bridge and down to the river’s brink. She came back, her hands held cup-wise, and dashed the water over her sister’s face. The child’s eyelids flickered a little, but that was all. She remained as motionless and seemingly unconscious as before. With a desperate effort, Nance tried to lift her up bodily in her arms, but stiff and limp as the girl was, this seemed an attempt beyond her strength.
Once more she stood, helpless and silent, regarding the other as she lay. Then it dawned upon her mind that the only possible thing to do was to leave her where she was and run to the village for help. She would arouse her own landlady. She would get the assistance of Dr. Raughty.