CHAPTER XI
THE LUGGER
As he disappeared the desire to run after him, to cry out to him, to cry out to all the ears of the court the story he had told me, rushed over me, an insane impulse. "What would that do but make everything worse, even harder for him to bear? Haven't I made things hard enough for him already?" I who had said I loved him, that I believed in his innocence, had yet virtuously urged him to go back and give himself up—to what? Why, my poor little coward mind was even afraid to name what that thing was!
The Spanish Woman had not been afraid, no, not of anything! She had risked everything that she had to save him in the best way that she knew. Was I, as she had so bitterly told me, only a creature of words with no deeds to make them good? It was all very well to say things would turn out right; but now I saw that they would not unless I made them; and how was that to be managed if he wouldn't speak, and I was in his confidence and couldn't?
I puzzled it over as my carriage rattled slowly back up Montgomery Avenue. Suddenly from what had been absolutely sterile cogitation, there sprang up the full flower of an idea. All that he had said that evening had carried the same perplexing undercurrent of a thing that he could not speak of, and always it seemed to point to the Spanish Woman. "She knows!" I thought triumphantly, "and if she knows, why, she must not go away until she has told me." The whole thing opened before me complete, unexpected, a deliverance.
I looked out of the window. Faintest, earliest dawn was already beginning. There was but one thing to do. Johnny had told me that the Spanish Woman was going aboard the lugger at dawn. I directed the driver to drive to the Black Point wharf.
He peered at me as if he thought me crazy. "That feller gave me a gold piece, ye know," he said, "or I wouldn't have taken ye as far as this."
"Go on," I said, and queerly enough I didn't feel at all afraid of the man. "Go on, and my father, Mr. Fenwick, will give you more when you take me home; and besides you are doing a service for the city."
Muttering that it was the weirdest go that he had ever struck, he clucked to the weary horses, and after a little more of cobblestones, began the struggle through the sand.
Those terrible sand-hills! We labored in them like a snail. They seemed to hang on the wheels, and to heap themselves in front of us; but the increasing light came on wings and what exact moment in all this long, gray and golden approach of the sun was to be considered dawn? At last we were over the hilltop, and floundering down the other side, the trees and gardens of houses overlooking the water front upon my left-hand, upon the other, sand and sea. Straight below, running out from the shore, was the little disused wharf. One or two Italian fishing-boats rocked in its shadow, but no vessel was in sight.