After her encounter with Nance, Mrs. Renshaw, returning to Oakguard, informed both Philippa and Brand of the improvement in the condition of Adrian Sorio.

Philippa received the news quietly enough, conscious that the eyes of her brother were upon her; but as soon as she could get away, which was not till the afternoon was well advanced, she slipped off hastily and directed her steps, by a short cut through the park, to the Rodmoor railway-station. She had one fixed idea now in her mind—the idea of seeing Adrian and talking with him before any interview was allowed to the others.

She knew that her name and her prestige as the sister of the largest local landowner, would win her at any rate respectful consideration for anything she asked—and everything beyond that she left recklessly in the hands of fate.

Baltazar’s death had affected her more than she would herself have supposed possible. She had felt during these last days a sort of malignant envy of her mother, whose attitude towards her friend’s loss was so strange and abnormal.

Philippa, with her scarlet lips, her classic flesh, her Circean feverishness, suffered from her close association with this exultant mourner, as some heathen boy robbed of his companion might have suffered from contact with a Christian visionary, for whom death was “far better.”

At this moment, however, as she hurried towards the station, it was not of Baltazar, it was of Adrian, and Adrian only, that she thought.

She dismissed the fact of Baptiste’s expected arrival with bitter contempt. Let the boy go to Nance if he pleased! After all, it was to herself—much more intimately than to Nance—that Adrian had confided his passionate idealization of his son and his savage craving for him.

Yes, it was to her he had confided this, and it was to her always, and never to Nance, that he spoke of his book and of his secret thoughts. Her mind was what Adrian wanted—her mind, her spirit, her imagination. These were things that Nance, with all her feminine ways, was never able to give him.

Why couldn’t she tear him from her now and from all these people?

Let these others be afraid of his madness. He was not mad to her. If he were, why then, she too, she who loved him and understood him, was mad!

From the long sloping spaces of the park, as she hurried on, she could see at intervals, through the misty sun-bathed trees, the mouth of the harbour, with its masts and shipping, and, beyond that, the sea itself.

Ah! the sea was the thing that had mingled their souls! The sea was the accomplice of their love!

Yes, he was hers—hers in the heights and the depths—and none of them should tear him from her!

All the whimpering human crowd of them, with their paltry pieties and vulgar prudence—how she would love to strike them down and pass over them—over their upturned staring faces—until he and she were together!

Through the dreamy air, with its floating gossamer-seeds and faint smell of dead leaves, came to her, as she ran on, over the uneven ground, past rabbit-holes and bracken and clumps of furze, the far distant murmur of the waves on the sands. Yes! The sea was what had joined them; and, as long as that sound was in her ears, no power on earth could hold them apart!

She reached the station just in time. It was five minutes to five and the train left at the hour. Philippa secured a first-class ticket for herself and sank down exhausted in the empty compartment.

How long that five minutes seemed!

She was full of a fierce jealous dread lest any of Nance’s friends might be going that very evening to visit the patient.

She listened to the conversation of two lads on the platform near her carriage window. They were speaking of a great bonfire which was to be prepared that day, on the southern side of the harbour, to be set alight the following evening, in honour of the historic Fifth of November. In the tension of her nerves Philippa found herself repeating the quaint lines of the old refrain, associated in her mind with many childish memories.

And the question flashed through her mind as to what would have happened by the time that great spire of smoke and flame—she recalled the look of it so well!—rose up and drifted across the water. Would it be the welcoming signal to bring Baptiste to Rodmoor—to Rodmoor and to Adrian?

Two minutes more! She watched the hand upon the station-clock. It was slowly crossing the diminishing strip of white which separated it from the figure of the hour. Oh, these cruel signs, with their murderous moving fingers! Why must Love and Hope and Despair depend upon little patches of vanishing white, between black marks?

Off at last! And she made a little gasping noise in her throat as if she had swallowed that strip of white.

An hour later, as the November darkness was closing in, she passed through the iron gates into the Asylum garden. As she moved in, a small group of inmates of the Asylum, accompanied by a nurse, emerged from a secluded path. It was shadowy and obscure under those heavy trees, but led by the childish curiosity of the demented, these unfortunate persons, instead of obeying their attendant’s command, drifted waveringly towards her.

A movement took place among them like that described by Dante in his Inferno as occurring when some single soul, out of a procession of lost spirits, recognizes in the dubious twilight, a living figure from the upper air.

For the moment Philippa wondered if Adrian was among them, but if he was he was given no opportunity to approach her, for the alert guardian of these people, like some Virgilian watcher of ghostly shadows upon the infernal stream, shepherded them away, across the darkened lawn, towards the corner of the building.

The Renshaw name acted like magic when she reached the house. Yes, Mr. Sorio was much better; practically quite himself again, and there was no reason at all why Miss Renshaw should not have an interview with him. A letter had, indeed, only that very afternoon been posted to Miss Herrick, asking her to come up to the place the following day.

Philippa inquired whether her interview with the patient might take the form of a little walk with him, before the hour of their evening meal. This request produced a momentary hesitation on the part of the official to whom she made it, but ultimately—for, after all, Miss Renshaw was the sister of the magistrate who had procured the unhappy man’s admission into the place—that too was granted her, on condition that she returned in half-an-hour’s time, and did not take her companion into the streets of the town. Having granted her request the Asylum doctor left her in the waiting-room, while he went to fetch her friend.

Philippa sank down upon a plush-covered chair and looked around her. What a horrible room it was! The shabby furniture, covered with gloomy drapery, had an air of sombre complicity with all the tragedies that darkened human life. It was like a room only entered when some one was dead or dying. It was like the ante-room to a cemetery. Everything in it drooped, and seemed anxious to efface itself, as if ashamed to witness the indecent exposures of outraged human thoughts.

They brought Sorio at last, and the man’s sunken eyes gleamed with a light of indescribable pleasure when his hand met Philippa’s and clutched it with trembling eagerness.

They went out of the room together and moved down the long passage that led to the entrance of the place. As she walked by his side, Philippa experienced the queer sensation of having him as her partner in some diabolic danse-macabre, performed to the mingled tune of all the wild “songs of madness” created since the beginning of the world.

She couldn’t help noticing that the groups of people they passed on their way had an air quite different from persons in a hospital or even in a prison. They made her think—these miserable ones—of some horrible school for grown-up people; such a school as those who have been ill-used in childhood see sometimes in their dreams.

They seemed to loiter and gather and peer and mutter, as if, “with bated breath and whispering humbleness,” they were listening to something that was going on behind closed doors. Philippa got the impression of a horrible atmosphere of guilt hanging over the place, as if some dark and awful retribution were being undergone there, for crimes committed against the natural instincts of humanity.

A lean, emaciated old woman came shuffling past them, with elongated neck and outstretched arms. “I’m a camel! I’m a camel! I’m a camel!” Philippa heard her mutter.

Suddenly Adrian laid his hand on her arm. “They let me have my owl in here, Phil,” he said. “We mustn’t go far to-night or it’ll get hungry. It has its supper off my plate. I never told you how I found it, did I? It was pecking at her eyes, you know. Yes, at her eyes! But that’s nothing, is it? She had been dead for weeks, and owls are scavengers, and corpses are carrion!”

They crossed the garden with quick steps.

“How good the air is to-night!” cried Philippa’s companion, throwing back his head and snuffing the leaf-scented darkness.

They were let out through the iron gates and turning instinctively south-wards, they wandered slowly down to the river—the girl’s hand resting on the man’s arm.

They passed, on their way, the blackened wall of a disused factory. A blurred and feeble street-lamp threw a flickering light upon this wall. Pasted upon its surface was a staring and coloured advertisement of some insurance company, representing a phoenix surrounded by flames.

Philippa thought at once of the bonfire which was being prepared for the ensuing evening. Would Adrian’s boy really arrive in so short a time? And would Adrian himself, like that grotesque bird, so imperturbable in the midst of its funeral pyre, rise to new life after all this misery? Let it be her—oh, great heavenly powers!—let it be her and not Nance, nor Baptiste, nor any other, who should save him and heal him!

Still looking at the picture on the wall, she repeated to her companion a favourite verse of Mrs. Renshaw’s which she had learnt as a child.

The rich dirge-like music of these Shakespearian rhymes—placed so quaintly under their strange title of “Threnos,” at the end of the familiar volume—had a soothing influence upon them both at that moment.

It seemed to Philippa as if, by her utterance of them, they both came to share some sad sweet obsequies over the body of something that was neither human nor inhuman, something remote, strange, ineffable, that lay between them, and was of them and yet not of them, like the spirit-corpse of an unborn child.

They reached the bank of the river. The waters of the Loon were high and, through the darkness, a murmur as if composed of a hundred vague whispering voices blending together, rose to their ears from its dark surface.

They moved down close to the river’s edge. A small barge, with its long guiding-pole lying across it, lay moored to the bank. Without a moment’s delay—as if the thing had been prepared in advance to receive him—Adrian jumped into the barge and seized the pole.

“Come!” he said quietly.

She was too reckless and indifferent to everything now, to care greatly what they did; so without a word of protest, or any attempt to turn his purpose, she leapt in after him and settling herself in the stern, seized the heavy wooden rudder.

The tide was running sea-ward, fast and strong, and the barge, pushed vigorously by Adrian’s pole away from the bank, swept forward into the darkness.

Adrian, standing firmly on his feet, continued to hold the pole, his figure looming out of obscurity, tall and commanding.

The tide soon swept them beyond the last houses of the town and out into the open fens.

The night was very still and quite free from wind but a thin veil of mist concealed the stars.

Adrian, letting the pole sink down on the deck of the barge, moved forward to where she sat holding the rudder, and stretched himself out at her feet.

“Will they follow us?” he whispered in a dreamy indifferent voice.

“No, no!” the girl answered. “They’ll never think of this. They’ll wait for us and when we don’t come back, they’ll search the town and the roads. Let’s go on as we are, dearest. What does it matter? What does anything matter?”

She lay back and ran her fingers gently and dreamily over his forehead.

Swiftly and silently the barge swept on, and willows, poplars, weirs, dam-gates, tall reeds and ruined rush-thatched hovels, passed them by, like figures woven out of unreal shadows.

The water gurgled against the sides of the barge and whispered mournfully against the banks, and, as they advanced, the mystery of the night and the brooding silence of the fens received them in a mystic embrace.

A strange deep happiness gradually surged up in Philippa’s heart. She was with the man she loved; she was with the darkness she loved, and the river she loved. The Loon carried them forward, the pitiful friendly Loon, the Loon which had flowed by the dwelling of her race for so many ages; the Loon which had given Baltazar the peace he craved.

Just the faintest tremor of doubt troubled her, the thought that it was towards Nance—towards her rival—that the tide was bearing them; but let come what might come, that hour at least was hers! Not all the world could take that hour from her—and the future? What did the future matter?

As to the brain-sick man himself, who lay at the girl’s feet, it were long and hard to tell all the strange dim visions that flowed through his head. He took Philippa’s hand in his own and kissed it tenderly but, had the girl known, his thoughts were not of her. They were not even of his son; of the son for whom he had so passionately longed. They were not of any human being. They circled constantly—these thoughts—round a strange vague image, an image moulded of white mists and white vapours and the reflection of white stars in dark waters.

This image, of a shape dim and vast and elemental, seemed to flow upwards from land and sea, and stretch forth towards infinite space. It was an image of something beyond human expression, of something beyond earth-loves and earth-hatreds, beyond life and also beyond death. It was the image of Nothingness; and yet in this Nothingness there was a relief, an escape, a refuge, a beyond-hope, which made all the ways of humanity seem indifferent, all its gods childish, all its dreams vain, and yet offered a large cool draught of “deep and liquid rest” the taste of which set the soul completely free.

Many hours passed thus over their heads, as the tide carried them down towards Rodmoor, round the great sweeping curves made by the Loon, through the stubble-fields and the marshes.

It was, at last, the striking of the side of the barge against one of the arches of the New Bridge, which roused the prostrate man from the trance into which he had fallen.

As soon as they had emerged on the further side of the arch, he leapt to his feet. Bending forward towards Philippa, he pointed with an outstretched arm towards the shadowy houses of Rodmoor which, with here and there a faint light in some high window, could now be discerned through the darkness.

“I smell the sea!” he cried. “I smell the sea! Drift on, Phil, my little one, drift on to the harbour! I must leave you now. We shall meet by the sea, my girl—by the sea in the old way—but I can’t wait now. I must be alone, alone, alone!”

Waving his hand wildly with a gesture of farewell, he clutched at a clump of reeds and sprang out upon the bank. Philippa, letting the barge float on as it pleased, followed him with all the speed she could.

He had secured a considerable start of her, however, and it was all she could do to keep him in sight in the darkness.

He ran first towards the church, but when he reached the path which deviated towards the sand-dunes, he turned sharply eastward. He ran wildly, desperately, with no thought in his whole being but the feeling that he must reach the sea and be alone.

He felt at that moment as though the whole of humanity—loathsome, cancerous, suffocating humanity—were pursuing him with outstretched hands.

Once, as he was mid-way between the church path and the dunes, he turned his head, and catching sight of Philippa’s figure following him, he plunged forward in a fury of panic.

As he crossed the dunes, at this savage pace, something seemed to break in his brain or in his heart. He spat out a mouthful of sweet-tasting blood, and, falling on his knees, fumbled in the loose sand, as if searching for some lost object.

Staggering once more to his feet, and seeing that his pursuer was near, he stumbled wildly down the slope of the dunes and tottered across the sand to the water’s edge.

He was there at last—safe from everything—safe from love and hatred and madness and pity—safe from unspeakable imaginations—safe from himself!

The long dark line of waves broke calmly and indifferently at his feet, and away—away into the eternal night—stretched the vast expanse of the sea, dim, vague, full of inexpressible, infinite reassurance.

He raised both his arms into the air. For one brief miraculous moment his brain became clear and an ecstatic feeling of triumph and unconquerable joy swept through him.

“Baptiste!” he shouted in a shrill vibrating voice, “Baptiste!”

His cry went reverberating over the water. He turned and tried to struggle back. A rush of blood once more filled his mouth. His head grew dizzy.

“Tell Nance that I—that I—” His words died into a choking murmur and he fell heavily on his face on the sand.

He was dead when she reached him. She lifted him gently till he lay on his back and then pressing her hand to his heart, she knew that it was the end.

She sank beside him, bowing her forehead till it touched the ground, and clinging to his neck. After a minute or two she rose, and taking his hand in her own she sat staring into the darkness, with wide-open tearless eyes.

She was “alone with her dead” and nothing mattered any more now.

She remained motionless for several long moments, while over her head something that resembled eternity seemed to pass by, on beautiful, terrible, beating wings.

Then she rose up upon her feet.

“She shall never have him!” she murmured. “She shall never have him!”

She tore from her waist a strongly-woven embroidered cord, the long tassels of which hung down at her side. She dragged the dead man to the very edge of the water. With an incredible effort, she raised him up till he leant, limp and heavy, against her own body.

Then, supporting him with difficulty, and with difficulty keeping herself from sinking under his weight, she twisted the cord round them both, and tied it in a secure knot. Holding him thus before her, with his chin resting on her shoulder, she staggered forward into the water.

It was not easy to advance, and her heart seemed on the point of breaking with the strain. But the savage thought that she was taking him away from Nance—from Nance and from every one—to possess him herself forever, gave her a supernatural strength.

It seemed as though the demon of madness, which had passed from Adrian at the last, and left him free, had entered into her.

If that was indeed the case, it is more than likely that when she fell at last—fell backwards under his weight beneath the waves—it was rather with a mad ecstasy of abandonment that she drank the choking water, than with any hopeless struggle to escape the end she had willed.

Bound tightly together, both by the girl’s clinging arms and by the cord she had fastened round them, the North Sea as it drew back in the out-flowing of its tide, carried their bodies forth into the darkness.

Far from land it carried them—under the misty unseeing sky—far from misery and madness, and when the dawn came trembling at last over the restless expanse of water, it found only the white sea-horses and the white sea-birds. Those two had sunk together; out of reach of humanity, out of reach of Rodmoor.

THE END