After the breakfast was ended Winifred went over the entire drama of
that night of the landslip as far as she knew it. There was not an
important incident that she missed. Every detail of her narrative was
so vividly given that I lived it all over again. She recalled our
meeting on the sands, and my inexplicable bearing when she told me of
the seaman's present of precious stones to her father. She dwelt upon
my mysterious conduct in insisting upon our ascending the cliff by
different gangways. She recalled her picking up from the sands a
parchment scroll and spelling out by the moonlight the words of the
curse it called down upon the head of any one who should violate the
tomb from which the parchment and the jewel had been stolen, but as
she repeated the words of the curse she was evidently unconscious of
the tremendous import of the words in regard to herself and her
father. She told me of her desire to conceal from me, for my own sake
merely, the evidence afforded by the scroll that my father's tomb had
been violated. She recalled my seeing the parchment and being thrown
thereby into a state of the greatest mental agony. She recalled my
taking her hand as we neared the new tongue of land made by the
_débris_, and peering round it as though in dread of some concealed
foe, but evidently she had no idea of _what_ was behind there. She
described the way in which my 'foot slipped on the sand,' and how I
was thrown back upon her as she stood waiting to pass the _débris_
herself. She spoke of my unaccountable and apparently mad suggestion
that we should, although the tide was coming in, and we were already
in danger of being imprisoned in the cove and drowned, sit down on
the boulder made sacred to us both by our childish betrothal. She
spoke of her own suspicion, and then her conviction, that some great
calamity was threatening me on account of the violation of the tomb,
and that the knowledge of this was governing all these strange
movements of mine. She reminded me of my telling her that the shriek
we both heard at the moment when the cliff fell was connected with
the crime against my father, and that it was the call from the grave
which, according to wild traditions, will sometimes come to the heir
of an old family. She recalled the very words I used when I told her
that in answer to this call I intended to remain there until the tide
came in and drowned me. She dwelt upon the way in which I urged her
to go and leave me, her own resolution to die with me, and her
cutting up her shawl into a rope and tying herself to me. She
recalled the sudden thunderous noise of the settlement in response
to the tide, and my springing up and running to the mass of _débris_
and looking round it, and then my calling her to join me; and finally
she described her running toward Needle Point in order to pass round
it before the tide should get any higher, her plunging into the sea
and my pulling her round the Point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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