And so she got the girl to light candles, and asked
her a great many questions, and obliged her, in fact,
to speak constantly though she seemed to listen but
little. And when at last the girl herself, growing
interested in her own narrative about a kidnapper,
grew voluble and animated, and looked round upon the
young lady at the crisis of the tale, she was surprised
to remark, on a sudden, that she was gazing vacantly
into the bars; and when Margery, struck by her fixed
and melancholy countenance, stopped in the midst of
a sentence, the young lady turned and gazed on her
wistfully, with large eyes and pale face, and sighed
heavily.
IN WHICH OLD TAMAR LIFTS UP HER VOICE IN PROPHECY.
Certainly Stanley Lake was right about Redman’s
Dell. Once the sun had gone down behind the distant
hills, it was the darkest, the most silent, and the
most solitary of nooks.
It was not, indeed, quite dark yet. The upper
sky had still a faint gray twilight halo, and the
stars looked wan and faint. But the narrow walk
that turned from Redman’s Dell was always dark
in Stanley’s memory; and Sadducees, although
they believe neither in the resurrection nor the judgment,
are no more proof than other men against the resurrections
of memory and the penalties of association and of
fear.
Captain Lake had many things to think of. Some
pleasant enough as he measured pleasure, others troublesome.
But as he mounted the stone steps that conducted the
passenger up the steep acclivity to the upper level
of the dark and narrow walk he was pursuing, one black
sorrow met him and blotted out all the rest.
Captain Lake knew very well and gracefully practised
the art of not seeing inconvenient acquaintances in
the street. But here in this narrow way there
met him full a hated shadow whom he would fain have
‘cut,’ by looking to right or left, or
up or down, but which was not to be evaded—would
not only have his salutation but his arm, and walked—a
horror of great darkness, by his side—through
this solitude.
Committed to a dreadful game, in which the stakes
had come to exceed anything his wildest fears could
have anticipated, from which he could not, according
to his own canons, by any imaginable means recede—here
was the spot where the dreadful battle had been joined,
and his covenant with futurity sealed.
The young captain stood for a moment still on reaching
the upper platform. A tiny brook that makes its
way among briars and shingle to the more considerable
mill-stream of Redman’s Dell, sent up a hoarse
babbling from the darkness beneath. Why exactly
he halted there he could not have said. He glanced
over his shoulder down the steps he had just scaled.
Had there been light his pale face would have shown
just then a malign anxiety, such as the face of an
ill-conditioned man might wear, who apprehends danger
of treading on a snake.
