Then I heard her murmur, 'Love-eyes! love-eyes! Henry's love-eyes!'
Then a terrible change came over her. She sprang up and came and
peered in my face. An indescribable expression of terror overspread
her features, her nostrils expanded, her lips were drawn tightly over
her teeth, her eyes seemed starting from their sockets; her throat
suddenly became fluted like the throat of an aged woman, then veined
with knotted, cruel cords. Then she stood as transfixed, and her face
was mimicking that appalling look on her father's face which I had
seen in the moonlight. With a yell of 'Father!' she leapt from me.
Then she rushed from the house, and I could hear her run by the
window, crying, 'Cursed, cursed, cursed by Henry's father!'
For an instant the movement took away my breath; but I soon recovered
and sprang after her to the door.
There, in the distance, I saw her in the rain, running along the
road. My first impulse was to follow her and run her down. But
luckily I considered the effect this might have in increasing her
terror, and stopped. She was soon out of sight. I wandered about the
road calling her name, and calling on Heaven to have a little pity--a
little mercy.
III
I decided to return to the house, but found that I had lost my way in
the obscurity and pelting rain. For hours I wandered about, without
the slightest clue as to where I was. I was literally soaked to the
skin. Several times I fell into holes in a morass, and was up to my
hips in moss and mud and water. Then I began to call out for
assistance till I was hoarse. I might as well have called out on an
uninhabited island.
The night wore on, and the darkness grew so intense that I could
scarcely see my hand when I held it up. Every star in the heavens was
hid away as by a thick-pall. The darkness was positively benumbing to
the faculties, and added, if possible, to the misery I was in on
account of Winifred. Suddenly my progress was arrested. I had fallen
violently against something. A human body, a woman! I thrust out my
hand and seized a woman's damp arm.
'Winifred,' I cried, 'it's Henry.'
'I thought as much.' said the voice of the Gypsy girl I had met at
the wayside inn, and she seized me by the throat with a fearful grip.
'You've been to the cottage and skeared her away, and now she's seed
you there she'll never come back; she'll wander about the hills till
she drops down dead, or falls over the brinks.'
'O God!' I cried, as I struggled away from her. 'Winifred! Winifred!
There was silence between us then.
'You seem mighty fond on her, young man,' said the Gypsy at length,
in a softened voice, 'and you don't strike out at me for grabbin'
your throat.'
'Winifred! Winifred!' I said, as I thought of her on the hills on a
night like this.
'You seem mighty fond on her, young man,' repeated the girl's voice
in the darkness.
But I could afford no words for her, so cruelly was misery lacerating
me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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