Rachel’s face was white and haggard. She seemed animated by some frenzied impulse—some inward, demoniac force which drove her on. Drops of perspiration stood out upon her forehead and made the grey hair that fell across it moist and clammy under the rim of her dusty black hat. Her clothes, as she held the girl close to her side, threw upon the air a musty, fetid odour.
“Where are your soft ways now?” she went on, “your little clinging ways, your touching little babyish ways? Where are your whims and your fancies? Your caprices and your blushes? Where are your white-faced pretences, and your sham terrors, only put on to make you look sweet?”
She had her hand upon the girl’s arm as she spoke and she tightened her grasp, almost shaking her in her mad malignity.
“Before you were born your mother was afraid of me,” she went on. “Oh, she gained little by cutting me out with her pretty looks! She gained little, Linda Herrick! She dared scarcely look me in the face in those days. She was afraid even to hate me. That is why you are what you are. You’re the child of her terror, Linda Herrick, the child of her terror!”
She paused for a moment while the girl’s breath came in gasps through her white lips as if under the burden of an incubus.
“Listen!” the woman hissed at last, staggering a little and actually leaning against the girl as though the frenzy of her malignity deprived her of her strength. “Listen, Linda. Do you remember what I used to tell you about your father? How in his heart all the time he loved only me? How he would sooner have got rid of your mother than have got rid of me? Do you remember that? Listen, then! There’s something else I must say to you—something that you’ve never guessed, something that you couldn’t guess. When you were—” she stopped, panting heavily and if Linda had not mechanically assisted her she would have fallen. “When you were—when I was—” Her breath seemed to fail her then completely. She put her hand to her side and in spite of the girl’s feeble effort to support her she sank, moaning, to the ground.
Linda looked helplessly round. Nance and Mrs. Renshaw had passed beyond a little promontory of sand-hills and were concealed from view. She knelt down by Rachel’s side. Even then—even when those vindictive dark eyes looked at her without a sign of consciousness, they seemed to hold her with their power. As they remained mute and motionless in this manner, the prostrate woman and the kneeling girl, a faint gust of wind, blowing the sand in a little cloud before it and rustling the leaves of the horned poppies, brought to Linda’s senses an odour of inland fields. She felt a dim return, under this air, of her normal faculties and taking one of the woman’s hands in her own she began gently chafing it. Rachel answered to the touch and a shiver passed through her frame. Then, in a flash, intelligence came back into her eyes and her lips moved. Linda bent lower so as to catch her words. They came brokenly, and in feeble gasps.
“I loved him so, I loved him more than my life. He took my life and killed it. He killed my heart. He brought me those beads from far across the sea. They were for me—not for her. He brought them for me, I tell you. I gave him my heart for them and he killed it. He killed it and buried it. This isn’t Rachel’s heart any more. No! No! It isn’t Rachel’s. Rachel’s heart has gone with him—with the Captain—over great wide seas. He got it—out of me—when—he—kissed my mouth.”
Her voice died away in inarticulate mutterings. Then once more her words grew human and clear.