She hurried off herself, as she spoke, heedless of the invalid up-stairs, of lashing rain, and driving wind, and black night. Heedless of all but that terrible fear, Midge hurried through the storm to the shore.
In the next day's issue of the Speckport Spouter, the following item appeared:
"Mysterious Disappearance!—Yesterday evening, about seven o'clock, Miss Nathalie Marsh quitted her residence in Cottage Street, without informing her friends where she was going, and has not since been heard of. Upon the discovery of her absence, search was made along the shore, in which direction she was seen to go, and a crape vail, recognized as belonging to Miss Marsh, found on the old wharf at the end of Cottage Street. The vail had been caught by a spike projecting from the wharf, immediately above the water. It is feared that a dreadful accident has happened, and the young lady has been drowned. She had been ill and a little delirious some time before, and we presume wandered down to the old wharf, a most dangerous place at all times, and particularly so on a dark and stormy night, such as last night was, and fell in. Any intelligence of her will be thankfully received, and liberally rewarded, by her afflicted friends. The young lady was dressed in deep mourning, and might easily be recognized by the luxuriant abundance of her golden hair."
Speckport read this paragraph over its breakfast coffee and toast, and was profoundly shocked thereby. And so poor Miss Marsh had drowned herself! They had expected as much all along—she was not the girl to survive such disgrace! But it was very dreadful; and they wouldn't wonder to hear next that the poor bereaved mother had died of a broken heart. They hoped the body would be recovered—it would be a melancholy consolation to her friends, not to say to her enemies, who would then be out of doubt as to her fate. People went past the house in Cottage Street with the same morbid curiosity that had driven them to Redmon after the murder, and stared at the closed blinds and muffled knocker, and thought of the wretched mother lying within, whose footsteps were even then crossing the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Two weeks passed, and these charitable wishes were not fulfilled. The mother of Nathalie still lay ill unto death, and still faithfully waited on by Midge and Miss Jo. It was toward the close of the second week that Val received a note from the coroner of a fishing-village, some ten miles up the coast, informing him that, the day previously, the body of a woman answering the description of Miss Marsh had been washed ashore, that an inquest had been held, and a verdict of "Found drowned" returned. If the missing girl's friends would come immediately they might be able to identify the corpse.
Before noon, after the receipt of this missive, Mr. Val Blake was bending over the corpse of the drowned woman, as it lay in its rough deal coffin in the village dead-house. Before sunset he was back in Speckport, and bore the deal coffin and its quiet contents to No. 16. Great St. Peter Street. The slender girlish form, the mourning dress, the long fair hair, were not to be mistaken, though what had been the face was too horrible to look upon. Val turned away from what had once been so beautiful, with a shudder; and thought of the Duke of Gandia, made a saint by a similar sight. Before morning, the deal coffin was inclosed in another of rosewood, and a grave dug in Speckport Cemetery. The funeral was an unusually quiet and solemn one, though there was no requiem mass for the soul of the departed offered up in the cathedral—why should there for a wretched suicide, forever lost?
Mr. Val Blake, with no sentimentality about him, and not over straight-laced either, in some things, was yet a generous, good-hearted fellow in the main, and placed a white marble cross over the dead girl's grave. Some very good people were rather scandalized by the act. A cross over the grave of a suicide!—it was sacrilege. But Mr. Blake did not care much what good people or bad people thought or said of his actions; and did just as he pleased, in spite of their teeth. So the white cross remained gleaming palely in the spectral moonlight, and casting its solemn shadow over the grave in the sunshine. It bore no inscription—what inscription could be placed over such a grave?—only the name "Nathalie." Her story was told, her life ended, the world went on, and she was forgotten! O sublime lesson of life! told in three words: Dead and forgotten!
So, while Charley skulked in dark places, a hunted criminal, with a price on his head, and his mother lay still hovering on that narrow boundary that divides life and death, morning sunlight and noonday shadows brightened and darkened around that pale cross in the cemetery, and the night winds sighed over Nathalie's grave.