第78章 A MERE INTERLUDE(5)

Baptista looked back again at the water in bewilderment,as if her senses were the victim of some sleight of hand.Not a speck or spot resembling a man's head or face showed anywhere.By this time she was alarmed,and her alarm intensified when she perceived a little beyond the scene of her husband's bathing a small area of water,the quality of whose surface differed from that of the surrounding expanse as the coarse vegetation of some foul patch in a mead differs from the fine green of the remainder.Elsewhere it looked flexuous,here it looked vermiculated and lumpy,and her marine experiences suggested to her in a moment that two currents met and caused a turmoil at this place.

She descended as hastily as her trembling limbs would allow.The way down was terribly long,and before reaching the heap of clothes it occurred to her that,after all,it would be best to run first for help.Hastening along in a lateral direction she proceeded inland till she met a man,and soon afterwards two others.To them she exclaimed,'I think a gentleman who was bathing is in some danger.Icannot see him as I could.Will you please run and help him,at once,if you will be so kind?'

She did not think of turning to show them the exact spot,indicating it vaguely by the direction of her hand,and still going on her way with the idea of gaining more assistance.When she deemed,in her faintness,that she had carried the alarm far enough,she faced about and dragged herself back again.Before reaching the now dreaded spot she met one of the men.

'We can see nothing at all,Miss,'he declared.

Having gained the beach,she found the tide in,and no sign of Charley's clothes.The other men whom she had besought to come had disappeared,it must have been in some other direction,for she had not met them going away.They,finding nothing,had probably thought her alarm a mere conjecture,and given up the quest.

Baptista sank down upon the stones near at hand.Where Charley had undressed was now sea.There could not be the least doubt that he was drowned,and his body sucked under by the current;while his clothes,lying within high-water mark,had probably been carried away by the rising tide.

She remained in a stupor for some minutes,till a strange sensation succeeded the aforesaid perceptions,mystifying her intelligence,and leaving her physically almost inert.With his personal disappearance,the last three days of her life with him seemed to be swallowed up,also his image,in her mind's eye,waned curiously,receded far away,grew stranger and stranger,less and less real.

Their meeting and marriage had been so sudden,unpremeditated,adventurous,that she could hardly believe that she had played her part in such a reckless drama.Of all the few hours of her life with Charles,the portion that most insisted in coming back to memory was their fortuitous encounter on the previous Saturday,and those bitter reprimands with which he had begun the attack,as it might be called,which had piqued her to an unexpected consummation.

A sort of cruelty,an imperiousness,even in his warmth,had characterized Charles Stow.As a lover he had ever been a bit of a tyrant;and it might pretty truly have been said that he had stung her into marriage with him at last.Still more alien from her life did these reflections operate to make him;and then they would be chased away by an interval of passionate weeping and mad regret.

Finally,there returned upon the confused mind of the young wife the recollection that she was on her way homeward,and that the packet would sail in three-quarters of an hour.

Except the parasol in her hand,all she possessed was at the station awaiting her onward journey.

She looked in that direction;and,entering one of those undemonstrative phases so common with her,walked quietly on.

At first she made straight for the railway;but suddenly turning she went to a shop and wrote an anonymous line announcing his death by drowning to the only person she had ever heard Charles mention as a relative.Posting this stealthily,and with a fearful look around her,she seemed to acquire a terror of the late events,pursuing her way to the station as if followed by a spectre.

When she got to the office she asked for the luggage that she had left there on the Saturday as well as the trunk left on the morning just lapsed.All were put in the boat,and she herself followed.

Quickly as these things had been done,the whole proceeding,nevertheless,had been almost automatic on Baptista's part,ere she had come to any definite conclusion on her course.

Just before the bell rang she heard a conversation on the pier,which removed the last shade of doubt from her mind,if any had existed,that she was Charles Stow's widow.The sentences were but fragmentary,but she could easily piece them out.

'A man drowned--swam out too far--was a stranger to the place--people in boat--saw him go down--couldn't get there in time.'The news was little more definite than this as yet;though it may as well be stated once for all that the statement was true.Charley,with the over-confidence of his nature,had ventured out too far for his strength,and succumbed in the absence of assistance,his lifeless body being at that moment suspended in the transparent mid-depths of the bay.His clothes,however,had merely been gently lifted by the rising tide,and floated into a nook hard by,where they lay out of sight of the passers-by till a day or two after.