"For God's sake, keep quiet," he begged. "What has happened to you?"
That he should be frightened by her violence made her more angry. She
threw at him the wildest accusations, how that through him she had
ceased to believe in God, to care for her family, for her honour, for
him, for life itself.
"Pauline, will you keep quiet. Are you mad to behave like this?"
He drove the canoe into a thorn-bush, so that it should not upset, and
he seized her wrist so roughly that she thought she screamed. There was
something splendid in that scream being able to disquiet the night, and
in an elation of woe she screamed again.
"Do you know what you're doing?" he demanded.
She found herself asking Guy if she were screaming, and when she knew
that at last she could hurt him, she screamed more loudly.
"You used to laugh at me when I said I might go mad," she cried. "Now do
you like it? Do you like it?"
"Pauline, I beg you to keep quiet. Pauline, think of your people. Will
you promise to keep quiet, if I take you out of this thorn-bush?"
He began to laugh not very mirthfully, and that he could laugh
infuriated her so much that she was silent with rage, while Guy
disentangled the canoe from the thorn-bush and more swiftly than before
urged it toward home.
When they reached the grassy bank that divided the Abbey stream from the
mill-pool, she would not get out of the canoe to walk to the other side.
"I cannot cross that pool," she said. "Guy, don't ask me to. I've been
afraid of it always. If we cross it to-night, I shall drown myself."
He tried to argue with her. He pleaded with her, he railed at her and
finally he laughed at her, until she got out and watched him launch the
canoe on the farther side and beckon through the tremulous sheen to her.
Wildly she ran down the steep bank and flung herself into the water.
* * * * *
"Where am I? Guy, where am I?"
"Well, at present you're lying on the grass, but where you've been or
where I've been this last five minutes.... Pauline, are you yourself
again?"
"Guy, my dearest, my dearest, I don't know why...."
She burst into tears.
"My dearest, how wet you are," she sobbed, stroking his drenched sleeve.
"Well, naturally," he said with a short laugh. "Look here, it was all my
fault for bringing you out, so don't get into a state of mind about
yourself, but you can't go back in the canoe. My nerves are still too
shaky. I can lift you over the wall behind the mill, and we must go back
to the Rectory across the street. Come, my Pauline, you're wet, you
know. Oh, my own, my sweet, if I could only uncount the hours."
Pauline would never have reached home but for Guy's determination. It
was he who guided her past the dark entries, past the crafty windows of
Rectory Lane, past the menacing belfry, past the trees of the Rectory
drive. By the front door he asked her if she dared go upstairs alone.
"I will wait on the lawn until I see your candle alight," he promised.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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