“What do you mean?” I asked, appalled—and when she did not answer, I asked again, with my hand clenched about her wrist and my eyes burning into her face, “What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure . . . but I suppose I mean . . . innocence. Since I came here, something has happened that I never can forget. I think it will make all my life worse.”
We went on. The sunlight was dying. The trees became spectral. In me, who walked beside this wonderful, clear-spirited girl, a monstrous horror welled.
I had a sense of vast, dark, insufferable wings hovering down. Was it fated that I should need to protect her against herself? Long before we reached the House, that I had sworn to do, at all costs, whatever should betide.
XXV.
The Flight of Parson Lolly
(There ended my diary. Thenceforth I was to be like a man in a maelstrom. And now that circumstances have stayed my hand from its task for weeks on end, I have no confidence that I can record with due proportion and emphasis events which seem to have been fantastic and instantaneous as dreams. Frantic suspense, frozen horror, and the rest are now a whirling memory. But I hope, above all else, that whoever reads these lines may feel, as those who knew her did, the splendid nervous courage, the shrewd discernment, and the strange compassion and mercy, of Paula Lebetwood!)
Make no mistake. The weary, faltering girl at my side—never, never for an instant did I suspect her.
Yet while we lagged through a ruined fairyland, past the wreck of Sir Pharamond’s first hold, beneath branches where the rooks were brawling, and between the ordered files of the summer-house park—all the way my heart grew blacker, and the incubus weighed heavier on my soul. I feared for her, and fear pressed cold fingers against my lips.
Blasphemous thoughts; they were not mine. I had no thoughts of her but reverence.
They might have been the jangling voices of the birds themselves: “Look! Here comes the foreign woman who was pledged to the Kingmaker, but is going to marry his millions instead! Why has she never wept a tear for the man in his shroud?” What if the trees had voices, these grey and sombre sycamores? “We saw what happened in the two twilights. We know where the golden-haired girl was when Cosgrove met his fate. We know when she left the strawberry grove the day that Heatheringham rushed toward death. We saw her slip across the shadowed lawn—”