“There he is! there he is again! There’s Mr. Oliver!”
They had approached the other Inlet as Jane spoke. Oliver stood at the top of it, exactly as he had stood at the other, his gaze fixed on her, his face ghastly. Not a muscle of his face moved; a dead man could not be more still. Sam, full of terror, was driving on like lightning, as if some evil thing were pursuing him.
And now Jane turned pale. What did it mean? these two appearances? It was totally impossible for Oliver to be at the last Inlet, if it was he who stood at the other. A bird of the air might have picked him up, carried him swiftly over the trees and dropped him at the second Inlet; nothing else could have done it in the time. What did it mean?
Mr. Preen was waiting at the door to receive Jane. He came a little way with slow steps down the path to meet her as the gig stopped. She ran in at the gate.
“What has happened, papa?” she cried. “Where’s Oliver?”
Oliver was upstairs, lying upon his bed—dead. Mr. Preen disclosed it to her as gently as he knew how.
It was all too true. Oliver had died about two hours before. He had shot himself at the Inlets, close by the melancholy osiers that grew over the brook.
Oliver had accompanied Jane to the end of Brook Lane. There, at the Islip Road, they parted; she going on to Crabb, Oliver walking back again. Upon reaching the Inlets, that favourite spot of his, he sat down on the bench that faced the highway; the self-same bench Jane had sat on when she was watching for his arrival from Tours, in the early days of spring. He had not sat there above a minute when he saw his father, with one or two more gentlemen, get over the gate from the field opposite. They were returning from shooting, and had their guns in their hands. Mr. Preen walked quickly over the road to Oliver.