A Loose End | Page 5

he been near he might have noticed a strange
expression in her eyes, as she furtively watched the precipitous descent.
The purple shadows now filled both sky and sea, and the island
opposite reared its grand outline solemnly in the twilight depths, as
though sitting in eternal judgment on the transient ways of men. The
evening star shone softly above the sea. Suddenly a crash, followed by
one sharp cry, was heard; then all was still.
"Good God! That's some one fallen down the path--why don't you go
and see, child?" but Marie seemed as if she could not stir. Old André
slowly dragged himself on to his feet, and took her arm, and they went
together. At the foot of the path they found the body of Pierre, dead, his
head having struck against a rock.
"He must have missed his footing in the dark," said André, when they
had rowed round to the fishing village to carry the news, and the
solitary constable had bustled forth, and was endeavouring to collect
information about the accident from the only two witnesses, of whom
the girl seemed to have lost the power of speech.
"He must have missed his footing in the dark; and then the rope broke
with his weight and the clutch he give it. It lies there all loose on the
ground."
"It shouldn't have broken," said the constable. "But I always did say
we'd ought to have an iron chain down there."

CHAPTER III.
Fifty years had passed, with all their seasons' changes, and the
changing life of nature both by land and sea, and had made as little
impression on the island as the ceaseless dashing of the waves against
its coast. The cliffs, the caves and the sea-beaten boulders were the

same; the colours of the bracken on the September hills, and of the sea
anemones in their green, pellucid pools, were the same, and the
fishermen's path down to the cove was the same. No iron chain had
been put there, but the rope had never broken again.
A violent south-west gale was blowing, driving scud and sea-foam
before it, while ever new armies of rain-clouds advanced threateningly
across the shadowy waters--mighty, moving mists, whose grey-winged
squadrons, swift and irresistible, enveloped and almost blotted from
sight the little rock-bound island, against which the forces of nature
seemed to be for ever spending themselves in vain. From time to time
through a gap in the shifting cloud-ranks there shone a sudden dazzling
gleam of sunlight on the white crests of the sea-horses far away.
The good French pastor, who struggled to discharge the offices of
religion in that impoverished and for the most part socially abandoned
spot, had just allowed himself to be persuaded by his wife that it was
unnecessary to visit his sick parishioner at the other end of the island
that afternoon, when a loud rat-tat was heard in the midst of a shriek of
wind, through a grudged inch of open door-way. The hurricane burst
into the house while a dripping, breathless girl panted forth her
message, that "old Marie" had been suddenly taken bad, and was dying,
and wanted but one thing in the world, to see the Vicar.
"I wonder what it is she has got to say," said the Vicar, as his wife
buttoned his mackintosh up to his throat. "I always did think there was
something strange about old Marie."
A mile of bitter, breathless battling with the storm, then a close
cottage-room, with rain-flooded floor, the one small window carefully
darkened, and on a pillow in the furthest corner, shaded by heavy
bed-curtains, a wrinkled old woman's face, pinched and colourless, on
which the hand of Death lay visibly.
But in the eagerness with which she signed to the pastor to come close,
and in the keen glance she cast round the room to see that no one else
was near, the vigour of life still asserted itself.

"I've somewhat to tell you, Father," she began in a rapid undertone, in
the island dialect. "I can't carry it to the grave with me, tho' I've borne it
in my conscience all my life. When I was a young lass it happened,
when things was different, and the men were rougher than now, and
strange deeds might be done from time to time, and never come under
the eye o' the law. And you must judge me, Father, by the way things
was then, for that was what I had to think of when it all happened.
"There was a young man that used to come a' courting me when I was a
lass o' nineteen, and he had a black heart for all he spoke so fair; but I
didn't see it at the first, and