“My heart went with him long ago, after that, over the sea. It was in all his ships. It was in every ship he sailed in—over far-off seas. And in place of my heart—something else—something else—came and lived in Rachel. It is this that—that—” The intelligence once more faded out of her eyes and she lay stiff and motionless. Linda had a sudden thought that she was dead and, with the thought, her fear of her rolled away. Looking at her now, lying there, in her black dress and crumpled bonnet, she seemed to see her as she was, a mad, wretched, passion-scorched human being. It crossed the young girl’s mind how inconceivable it was that this haggard image of desolation had once been young and soft-limbed, had once danced out on summer mornings to meet the sun as any other child! But even as this thought came to her, Rachel stirred and moved again. Her eyes had a dazed expression now—a clouded, sullen, hopeless expression. Slowly and with laborious effort, refusing Linda’s assistance, she rose to her feet.
“Go and call them,” she said in a low voice. “Go and call them. Tell Mrs. Renshaw that I’m ill—that she must take me home. You won’t be troubled with me much longer—not much longer! But you won’t forget me. Brand will see to that! No, you won’t forget me, Linda Herrick.”
The girl ran off without looking back. When the three of them returned, Rachel Doorm seemed to have quite resumed her normal taciturnity.
They walked back, all four together, to the harbour mouth. The sisters helped the two women into the little cart and untied the pony. As they clattered away over the cobble-stones, Nance received from Mrs. Renshaw a smile of gratitude, a smile of such illumined and spiritual gaiety that it rendered the pale face which it lit up beautiful with the beauty of some ancient picture.
When the pony-cart had disappeared, Nance and Linda sat down together on the wooden bench watching the white sail upon the horizon and talking of Rachel Doorm.
Most of the holiday-makers had now retired to their tea and a fresh breeze, coming in with the turn of the tide, blew pleasantly upon the girls’ foreheads and ruffled the soft hair under their daintily beribboned hats. Nance, holding in her fingers the trumpet-shaped shell, found herself suddenly wondering—perhaps because the shape of the shell reminded her of it—whether Linda had left that ominous fir-cone behind her in her room or whether at the last moment she had again slipped it into her dress. She glanced sideways at her sister’s girlish bosom, scarcely stirring now as with her head turned she looked at the full-brimmed tide, and she wondered if, under that white and pink frock so coquettishly open at the throat, there were any newly created blood-stains from the rasping impact of that rough-edged trophy of the satyr-haunted woods of Oakguard.
The afternoon light was so beautiful upon the water at that moment and the cries of the circling sea-gulls so full of an elemental callousness that the elder girl experienced a sort of fierce reaction against the whole weight of this intolerable sex-passion that was spoiling both their lives. Something hard, free and reckless seemed to rise up within her, in defiance of every sort of feminine sentiment and, hardly thinking what she did or of the effect of her words, “Quick, my dear,” she cried suddenly, “give me that fir-cone you’ve got under your dress!”
Linda’s hands rose at once and she clutched at her bosom, but her sister was too quick for her and too strong. Nance’s feeling at that moment was as if she were plucking a snake away. Rising to her feet when she had secured the trophy, she lifted up her arm and, with a fierce swing of her whole body, flung both it and the shell she had herself been holding far into the centre-current of the inflowing tide.
“So much for Love!” she cried fiercely.
The shell sank at once to the bottom but the fir-cone floated. For a moment, when she saw Linda’s dismay, she felt a pang of remorse. But she crushed it fiercely down. Behind her whole mood at that moment was a savage reaction from Mrs. Renshaw’s emotional perversity.