“What?”
“I won’t say the word. ’Tain’t fit to be spoke—about him an’ you.”
“If you mean wife—as I suppose you do—listen! Rather than have Richard Dempsey for a husband, I’d die—go down to the river and drown myself! That horrid wretch! I hate him!”
“I’m glad to hear you talk that way—right glad.”
“But why, Jack? You know it couldn’t be otherwise! You should—after all that’s passed. Heaven be my witness! you I love, and you alone. You only shall ever call me wife. If not—then nobody!”
“God bless ye!” he exclaims in answer to her impassioned speech. “God bless you, darling!” in the fervour of his gratitude flinging his arms around, drawing her to his bosom, and showering upon her lips an avalanche of kisses.
With thoughts absorbed in the delirium of love, their souls for a time surrendered to it, they hear not a rustling among the late fallen leaves; or, if hearing, supposed it to proceed from bird or beast—the flight of an owl, with wings touching the twigs; or a fox quartering the cover in search of prey. Still less do they see a form skulking among the hollies, black and boding as their shadows.
Yet such there is; the figure of a man, but with face more like that of demon—for it is he whose name has just been upon their lips. He has overheard all they have said; every word an added torture, every phrase sending hell to his heart. And now, with jealousy in its last dire throe, every remnant of hope extinguished—cruelly crushed out—he stands, after all, unresolved how to act. Trembling, too; for he is at bottom a coward. He might rush at them and kill both—cut them to pieces with the knife he is holding in his hand. But if only one, and that her, what of himself! He has an instinctive fear of Jack Wingate, who has more than once taught him a subduing lesson.
That experience stands the young waterman in stead now, in all likelihood saving his life. For at this moment the moon, rising, flings a faint light through the branches of the trees; and like some ravenous nocturnal prowler that dreads the light of day, Richard Dempsey pushes his knife-blade back into its sheath, slips out from among the hollies, and altogether away from the spot.
But not to go back to Rugg’s Ferry, nor to his own home. Well for Mary Morgan if he had.