 | CHAPTER XXIV.
THE FLIGHT OF NESTORIA. The Wetherel affair |  |
24. CHAPTER XXIV.
THE FLIGHT OF NESTORIA.
On the night in which Judge Wetherel, with murder stealthily watching
him from outer darkness, sat up to rewrite his will for the benefit of Nestoria
Bernard, the girl herself sat up in her own room, unable to sleep.
She was thinking of Edward; of the warnings which she had received that
he was unworthy of her; of the vague, incomplete, and yet gladdening retractions
which had followed on those warnings; of his beauty and graciousness
and irresistible tendernesses and lovable lovingness; of the decision which
must come to her concerning him from her father; of the undecipherable obscurity
of life beyond that; then again of Edward, always of Edward.
Amid so many meditations, of a character so sweetly or sorrowfully potent
for disturbance, how could she sleep, or even prepare herself for sleep? Furthermore,
there was something in the air of the night, a breath of miasma perhaps
from the marshes that stretched away along the westering coast, which
filled her nerves with tremors of unrest. Still dressed, she kept vigil for an
hour or two (how long she could not afterward remember) in a state of mind
which she tried to order into thought, but which persisted in remaining revery.
All manner of spiritual wanderings, a nomadic host of recollections, plans,
hopes, and fancies, came to her in confused succession, pushing one another
aside with eager impatience, like the hasty, transitory phantasms of dreams.
Things that belonged to the past and things that urgently claimed the future
plucked at her for a moment's consideration and vanished. It was one of those
hours in which the soul resembles a sea of little waves, devoid of drift or power,
tossing with wearisome monotony and breaking without result.
Of a sudden she perceived that her purse, containing all her little wealth
a hundred dollars or thereabouts, was not in her pocket. Poor as she was
was a matter of rousing importance. Wondering at her own carelessness,
she started up with a beating heart and commenced a search for the
lost valuable. It was nowhere in the room; but presently it occurred to her
that during the early evening she had bought a cheap little painted basket from
a wandering Indian, who had made her think of Sassacus and King Philip;
and then she remembered that she had last seen her treasure in the parlor.
She trusted tremblingly that it was there yet, and, lighting a candle, she went
down stairs to look for it, treading softly so as not to disturb the slumbering
household. Under a cushion of the sofa, just where she had mechanically
placed it for temporary safety, she found the purse.
With a childlike sense of having escaped a great peril, and with a piteous
unconsciousness of the real and horrible jeopardy of life which lurked within
a few yards of her, she joyfully thrust the treasure into the waist of her dress,
and turned to leave the room. But the quick movement extinguished her candle;
she was obliged to halt where she was until her eyes could become accustomed
to the sudden imposition of darkness; and now she made a discovery
which only this obscurity could have enabled her to make. A single frail
beam of light came to her tenderly, like some delicate angel warning her of
danger. In her surprise she nearly uttered an exclamation; and had she done
so, she might have arrested the step of imminent homicide, as also she might
have brought its alarmed violence upon herself. Being a brave girl, with the
steady nerves of health, she remained silent, and calmly studied the apparition,
discovering almost immediately that it came from the keyhole of the study
door. So unfamiliar was she with the thought of crime, that, notwithstanding
the lateness of the hour, not a suspicion of murder or burglary crossed her.
She took it for granted that Judge Wetherel had been kept up by pressure of
urgent business; and, saying to herself that she would surprise him with a second
“good-night,” she glided toward the study. On reaching the door, however,
the idea came to her that her venerable friend might not like to be disturbed
in his work, and she paused.
Her hand was still upon the knob, when she heard within an indistinct utterance
in a tone which she did not fully recognize; her first instantaneous
idea being that it could not be the voice of the Judge, and her next that he was
suffering with illness. We may suppose that the sound was the old man's instinctive
and inarticulate exclamation of surprise and alarm on awakening
from his nap in his chair to find an intruder at his elbow. Next, and almost
in the same breath, came the noise of a scuffle. Frightened at once, and yet
eager to know what was passing, Nestoria gently turned the knob, pushed the
door ajar, and looked into the room.
What she saw was a blow, a gray head sinking under it, and a murderer
bending over his victim. In the next instant all was darkness, at least to this
horrified spectator. Either the study lamp was at that moment extinguished,
or Nestoria temporarily lost the use even of her physical senses. She believed
that she had screamed with all her strength, but the probability is that she did
not give forth a sound, for it is certain that no one in the house heard a cry,
and that the assassin quietly finished his purloinings. Although the girl could
not afterward remember that she had fainted, there must have been a brief
period of unconsciousness, or of stupor approaching to it. We know that under
overwhelming oppression of fright or horror, conditions of spirit occur
which may fairly be called waking nightmares. Men suddenly attacked by
approaching death without striving to repel it or even uttering an exclamation,
as if in a state of catalepsy or bereft of reason.
But it was not merely the sight of a shocking crime and the proximity of a
mortal peril which had thus stunned Nestoria. Dreadful as these things were
to innocence and defencelessness, they were surpassed in outrage by a grisly
revelation. She had recognized, beyond the possibility of questioning, the face
of the assassin; she had seen it as the countenance of the man who but a moment
before had possessed her heart; she had not a doubt that the deathblow
had been dealt by the hand of Edward Wetherel. No wonder that she stood,
or it may be lay, beside this tragedy, palsied, speechless, and taking no more
part in the scene than if she had been a ghost; no wonder that for a few seconds,
or perhaps for several minutes, she was as powerless as the very spirit
of the murdered man, as inaudible and unprotesting.
But presently an instinct came to life in her. It was a sentiment of shuddering,
of aversion, of recoil. She became aware that she was in darkness,
and that through that darkness the murderer was approaching. It was not
fear of death which led her to retreat before him, but a sense that she could
not bear to be near him, and that it would kill her to have him speak to her.
In her stupefied horror, or, as we might fairly call it, her insanity, she was
only conscious of a desire to avoid recognition. This man, whom she had
lately loved, and whom she had just seen performing the work of a demon,
how could she possibly address a word to him, or hear him call her by name?
Dazed, almost senseless, and conscious mainly of loathing, she retreated mechanically
before the steps which stealthily picked their way through the obscurity,
as Christiana, if left alone in the Dark Valley, might have shrunk
back before the audible oncoming of Apollyon.
Presently she reached a door, and felt that it was open. She opened it
wider, passed noiselessly through it, and found herself in the outer air. A few
stars glimmered faintly between driving clouds, and a wild, sultry wind shook
all the ghostly branches of the trees. Of a sudden her physical strength returned
to her, and she fled at full speed, without reflecting whither, her only
thought being to avoid the fallen angel who haunted her steps, and to escape
the task of saying to him, I know you for a devil! With just the intelligence
of a scared animal, she followed a path which she had often traversed both by
daylight and moonlight, descended a steep slope of the little bluff on which the
house stood, and reached the shore. The sombre, indistinct, limitless sea was
at her feet; its enormous mystery attracted her as it has attracted many other
wretched hearts; it seemed to her as if it offered a refuge. On the land she
had met shipwreck, and she looked for mercy to the waters. A boat was at
hand; she must wade knee-deep in order to reach it; but in another minute
she had climbed or fallen into it; then the moorings were unlashed, and she
was adrift.
Nestoria had now evaded the awful interview, the fear of which had driven
her abroad; and, no longer upheld and impelled by the strength of terror, she
lost her consciousness; this time, there can be no doubt, she really fainted.
No pursuer came; no one was at hand either to destroy or save; and in a few
minutes the senseless girl was far from shore. The gale, it must be said, did
not threaten her safety immediately, for it blew off the land, and where she
now was raised no sea. The boat in which she lay was one of those large
skiffs which are known in the neighborhood of New Haven as “sharpies,” and
guided either by an oar in the stern or by a rudder. As the “sharpy” is flatbottomed,
and only draws a few inches of water, it is a fast craft in a light
breeze, but risky in a heavy one.
Nestoria's boat carried her out into the harbor and toward the meaning
expanse of Long Island Sound. It kept head on, for the single mast was set
well forward, and the imperfectly lashed sail, blowing out in a bellying pocket,
afforded a sufficient hold to the wind. There was a false, transitory prosperity
in the opening of this strange voyage, as there often is in the outset of
flights which seek destruction. With just such fatal smoothness are captives
in old poesy borne away by malignant magicians to imprisonment on undiscoverable
islands or in the caves of ocean. The home which murder had polluted,
the darkened room where a dear friend's reverend hair drooped into his
own blood, the clandestine face of that flying Cain from whom this unconscious
wanderer was escaping, the loved ones who would have sought to succor had
they known how succor was needed, were easily and speedily left behind. The
boat and its burden fluttered out afar from rescue upon a stormy sea.
At last there was an awakening. Life, which sometimes seems a monster
far more pitiless than death, dragged the girl back to suffering. At first she
did not know where she was, nor remember what had happened to her. She
was aware only of darkness, of solitude and abandonment, of an uneasy and
alarming movement, of a sense of utter helplessness. Of a sudden the past
struck her like a blow, and for a few moments she covered her face from it
with her hands, unobservant or careless of the frightful present. Then the increasing
and rapidly recurring roar of the surges, and the jerking, plunging
action of the boat as it entered the wilder waters beyond the bar, called her to
a sense of her strange situation. The storm of shocking recollections in her
soul subsided a little as the storm of relentless nature around her became more
audible, agitating, and menacing. Still amazed, even in the midst of her affright,
she sat up and looked about her.
She could see little. The rare and feeble stars, which seemed to swim like
wrecked sailors amid billowy clouds, had scant power of revelation. Around
her was tempestuous blackness, stretching away on every hand into infinity.
Even the snowy crests of the waves were only visible in a dim, spectral way,
and for a brief distance. The boat she could perceive, and the white ghost
of the struggling sail flying before her like a lost spirit, a guide ominous of a
grave. Holding by the handle of the leaping rudder, which had struck her
arm with a sort of spasmodic monition, as if urging her to seize it and exert
its spell, she turned and gazed, half-blinded, into the face of the gale. On her
left, but far behind her, she distinguished the red gleam of the lighthouse, now
darkening and now brightening as if signalling her to return. She knew at
last where she was, and comprehended what had befallen.
In this uttermost strait of sorrow and peril, flying from a paradise because
she had seen it changed into a hell, shrinking from sudden death and yet
scarcely desiring rescue, Nestoria bowed her head to pray.
It was the prayer of the shipwrecked, a petition which the remorseless sea
has so often mocked, changing it into a shriek of despair. A tumult of fighting
waves reeled into the boat, and in another moment the girl was struggling
for life.
| CHAPTER XXIV.
THE FLIGHT OF NESTORIA. The Wetherel affair | |