Controlling it, the other asks, with diminished interest, still earnestly:—
“What leads you to think that way, Wingate? Have you a reason?”
“Yes, have I; more’n one. It’s about that I ha’ come to consult ye.”
“You’ve come to astonish me! But proceed!”
“Well, sir, as I ha’ sayed, it’ll take a good bit o’ tellin’, and a lot o’ explanation beside. But since ye’ve signified I’m free to your time, I’ll try and make the story short’s I can.”
“Don’t curtail it in any way. I wish to hear all!”
The waterman thus allowed latitude, launches forth into a full account of his own life—those chapters of it relating to his courtship of, and betrothal to, Mary Morgan. He tells of the opposition made by her mother, the rivalry of Coracle Dick, and the sinister interference of Father Rogier. In addition, the details of that meeting of the lovers under the elm—their last—and the sad episode soon after succeeding.
Something of all this Ryecroft has heard before, and part of it suspected. What he now hears new to him is the account of a scene in the farm-house of Abergann, while Mary Morgan lay in the chamber of death, with a series of incidents that came under the observation of her sorrowing lover. The first, his seeing a shroud being made by the girl’s mother, white, with a red cross, and the initial letters of her name braided over the breast: the same soon afterwards appearing upon the corpse. Then the strange behaviour of Father Rogier on the day of the funeral; the look with which he stood regarding the girl’s face as she lay in her coffin; his abrupt exit out of the room; as afterwards his hurried departure from the side of the grave before it was finally closed up—a haste noticed by others as well as Jack Wingate.
“But what do you make of all that?” asks Ryecroft, the narrator having paused to gather himself for other, and still stranger revelations. “How can it give you a belief in the girl being still alive? Quite its contrary, I should say.”
“Stay, Captain! There be more to come.”