Helbeck of Bannisdale, vol 2 | Page 7

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 panic terror drove her on, but exhaustion and physical weakness caught at her will, and shod her feet with lead.
She walked down the platform, however, to the station-master.
"The gentleman has gone to inquire at the inn. Will you kindly tell him when he comes back that I have made up my mind after all to walk to Marsland? He can catch me up on the sands."
"Very good, Miss. But the sands aren't very safe for those that don't know 'em. If you're a stranger you'd better not risk it."
"I'm not a stranger, and my cousin knows the way perfectly. You can send him after me."
She left the station. In her preoccupation she never gave another thought to the station-master.
But there was something in the whole matter that roused that person's curiosity. He walked along the raised platform to a point where he could see what became of the young lady.
There was only one exit from the station. But just outside, the road from the town passed in a tunnel under the line. To get at the sands one must double back on the line after leaving the station, walk