Helbeck of Bannisdale, vol 2 | Page 7

directly--the express--and then we shut
the station for the night."
"How long will that be?" she asked faintly. He looked at his watch.
"Thirty-five minutes. You can go to the hotel, Miss. It's quite
respectable."
He gave her another sharp glance. He was a Dissenter, a man of
northern piety, strict as to his own morals and other people's. What on
earth was she doing here, in that untidy state, with a young man, at an
hour going on for midnight? Missed train? The young man said nothing
about missed trains.
But just as he was turning away, the girl detained him.
"How far is it across the sands to Marsland station?"
"Eight miles, about--shortest way."
"And the road?"
"Best part of fifteen."
He walked off, throwing a parting word behind him.
"Now understand, please, I can't have anybody here when we lock up

for the night."
Laura hardly heard him. She was looking first to one side of the station,
then to the other. The platform and line stood raised under the hill. Just
outside the station to the north the sands of the estuary stretched bare
and wide under the moon. In the other direction, on her right hand, the
hills rose steeply; and close above the line a limestone quarry made a
huge gash in the fell-side. She stood and stared at the wall of glistening
rock that caught the moon; at the little railing at the top, sharp against
the sky; at the engine-house and empty trucks.
Suddenly she turned back towards Mason. He stood a few yards away
on the platform, watching her, and possessed by a dumb rage of
jealousy that entirely prevented him from playing any rational or
plausible part. Her bitter tone, her evident misery, her refusal an hour or
two before to let him be her escort home--all that he had feared and
suspected that morning--during the past few weeks,--these things made
a dark tumult about him, in which nothing else was audible than the
alternate cries of anger and passion.
But she walked up to him boldly. She tried to laugh.
"Well! it is very unlucky and very disagreeable. But the station-master
says there is a respectable inn. Will you go and see, while I wait? If it
won't do--if it isn't a place I can go to--I'll rest here while you ask, and
then I shall walk on over the sands to Marsland. It's eight miles--I can
do it."
He exclaimed:
"No, you can't."--His voice had a note of which he was unconscious, a
note that increased the girl's fear of him.--"Not unless you let me take
you. And I suppose you'd sooner die than put up with another hour of
me!--The sands are dangerous. You can ask them."
He nodded towards the men in the distance.
She put a force on herself, and smiled. "Why shouldn't you take me?
But go and look at the inn first--please!--I'm very tired. Then come and
report."
She settled herself on a seat, and drew a little white shawl about her.
From its folds her small face looked up softened and beseeching.
He lingered--his mind half doubt, half violence, He meant to force her
to listen to him--either now, or in the morning. For all her scorn, she
should know, before they parted, something of this misery that burnt in

him. And he would say, too, all that it pleased him to say of that
priest-ridden fool at Bannisdale.
She seemed so tiny, so fragile a thing as he looked down upon her. An
ugly sense of power came to consciousness in him. Coupled with
despair, indeed! For it was her very delicacy, her gentlewoman's
grace--maddeningly plain to him through all the stains of the steel
works--that made hope impossible, that thrust him down as her inferior
forever.
"Promise you won't attempt anything by yourself--promise you'll sit
here till I come back," he said in a tone that sounded like a threat.
"Of course."
He still hesitated. Then a glance at the sands decided him. How, on
their bare openness, could she escape him?--if she did give him the slip.
Here and there streaks of mist lay thin and filmy in the moonlight. But
as a rule the sands were clear, the night without a stain.
"All right. I'll be back in ten minutes--less!"
She nodded. He hurried along the platform, asked a question or two of
the station-master, and disappeared.
She turned eagerly to watch. She saw him run down the road outside
the station--past a grove of trees--out into the moonlight again. Then
the road bent and she saw him no more. Just beyond the bend appeared
the first houses of the little town.
She rose. Her heart beat so, it seemed to her to be a hostile thing
hindering her. A