“Stop!” she shouted. “Don’t go!”
And listening with an attentive poise of the head, she could not tell whether it was the beat of the swell or his fateful tread that seemed to fall cruelly upon her heart. Presently every sound grew fainter, as though she were slowly turning into stone. A fear of this awful silence came to her—worse than the fear of death. She called upon her ebbing strength for the final appeal:
“Harry!”
Not even the dying echo of a footstep. Nothing. The thundering of the surf, the voice of the restless sea itself, seemed stopped. There was not a sound—no whisper of life, as though she were alone and lost in that stony country of which she had heard, where madmen go looking for gold and spurn the find.
Captain Hagberd, inside his dark house, had kept on the alert. A window ran up; and in the silence of the stony country a voice spoke above her head, high up in the black air—the voice of madness, lies and despair—the voice of inextinguishable hope. “Is he gone yet—that information fellow? Do you hear him about, my dear?”
She burst into tears. “No! no! no! I don’t hear him any more,” she sobbed.
He began to chuckle up there triumphantly. “You frightened him away. Good girl. Now we shall be all right. Don’t you be impatient, my dear. One day more.”
In the other house old Carvil, wallowing regally in his arm-chair, with a globe lamp burning by his side on the table, yelled for her, in a fiendish voice: “Bessie! Bessie! you Bessie!”
She heard him at last, and, as if overcome by fate, began to totter silently back toward her stuffy little inferno of a cottage. It had no lofty portal, no terrific inscription of forfeited hopes—she did not understand wherein she had sinned.
Captain Hagberd had gradually worked himself into a state of noisy happiness up there.