Gwen Wynn: A Romance of the Wye

“In any case there can be no harm in my making a scout across to Boulogne, and instituting inquiries about him. Mahon’s sister being at school in the establishment will enable us to ascertain whether a priest named Rogier holds relations with it, and we may learn something of the repute he bears. Perchance, also, a trifle concerning Mr and Mrs Lewin Murdock. It appears that both husband and wife are well known at Homburg, Baden, and other like resorts. Gaming, if not game, birds, in some of their migratory flights they have made short sojourn at the French seaport, to get their hands in for those grander Hells beyond. I’ll go over to Boulogne!”

A knock at the door. On the permission to enter, called out, a hotel porter presents himself. “Well?”

“Your waterman, sir, Wingate, says he’d like to see you, if convenient?”

“Tell him to step up!”

“What can Jack be coming after? Anyhow I’m glad he has come. ’Twill save me the trouble of sending for him; as I’d better settle his account before starting off.” (Jack has a new score against the Captain for boat hire, his services having been retained, exclusively, for some length of time past.) “Besides there’s something I wish to say – a long chapter of instructions to leave with him. Come in, Jack!”

This, as a shuffling in the corridor outside, tells that the waterman is wiping his feet on the door mat.

The door opening, displays him; but with an expression on his countenance very different from that of a man coming to dun for wages due. More like one entering to announce a death, or some event which greatly agitates him.

“What is it?” asks the Captain, observing his distraught manner.

“Somethin’ queer, sir; very queer indeed.”

“Ah! Let me hear it!” demands Ryecroft, with an air of eagerness, thinking it relates to himself and the matter engrossing his mind.

“I will, Captain. But it’ll take time in the tellin’.”

“Take as much as you like. I’m at your service. Be seated.”

Jack clutches hold of a chair, and draws it up close to where the Captain is sitting – by a table. Then glancing over his shoulder, and all round the room, to assure himself there is no one within earshot, he says, in grave, solemn voice:

“I do believe, Captain, she be still alive!”

Volume Three – Chapter Fifteen

Still Alive

Impossible to depict the expression on Vivian Ryecroft’s face, as the words of the waterman fall upon his ear. It is more than surprise – more than astonishment – intensely interrogative, as though some secret hope once entertained, but long gone out of his heart, had suddenly returned to it.

“Still alive!” he exclaims, springing to his feet, and almost upsetting the table. “Alive!” he mechanically repeats. “What do you mean, Wingate? And who?”

“My poor girl, Captain. You know.”

“His girl, not mine! Mary Morgan, not Gwendoline Wynn!” reflects Ryecroft within himself, dropping back upon his chair as one stunned by a blow.

“I’m almost sure she be still livin’,” continues the waterman, in wonder at the emotion his words have called up, though little suspecting why.

Controlling it, the other asks, with diminished interest, still earnestly: —

“What leads you to think that way, Wingate? Have you a reason?”

“Yes, have I; more’n one. It’s about that I ha’ come to consult ye.”

“You’ve come to astonish me! But proceed!”

“Well, sir, as I ha’ sayed, it’ll take a good bit o’ tellin’, and a lot o’ explanation beside. But since ye’ve signified I’m free to your time, I’ll try and make the story short’s I can.”

“Don’t curtail it in any way. I wish to hear all!”

The waterman thus allowed latitude, launches forth into a full account of his own life – those chapters of it relating to his courtship of, and betrothal to, Mary Morgan. He tells of the opposition made by her mother, the rivalry of Coracle Dick, and the sinister interference of Father Rogier. In addition, the details of that meeting of the lovers under the elm – their last – and the sad episode soon after succeeding.

Something of all this Ryecroft has heard before, and part of it suspected. What he now hears new to him is the account of a scene in the farm-house of Abergann, while Mary Morgan lay in the chamber of death, with a series of incidents that came under the observation of her sorrowing lover. The first, his seeing a shroud being made by the girl’s mother, white, with a red cross, and the initial letters of her name braided over the breast: the same soon afterwards appearing upon the corpse. Then the strange behaviour of Father Rogier on the day of the funeral; the look with which he stood regarding the girl’s face as she lay in her coffin; his abrupt exit out of the room; as afterwards his hurried departure from the side of the grave before it was finally closed up – a haste noticed by others as well as Jack Wingate.

“But what do you make of all that?” asks Ryecroft, the narrator having paused to gather himself for other, and still stranger revelations. “How can it give you a belief in the girl being still alive? Quite its contrary, I should say.”

“Stay, Captain! There be more to come.”

The Captain does stay, listening on. To hear the story of the planted and plucked up flower; of another and later visit made by Wingate to the cemetery in daylight, then seeing what led him to suspect, that not only had the plant been destroyed, but all the turf on the grave disturbed! He speaks of his astonishment at this, with his perplexity. Then goes on to give account of the evening spent with Joseph Preece in his new home; of the waifs and strays there shown him; the counterfeit coins, burglars’ tools, and finally the shroud – that grim remembrancer, which he recognised at sight!

His narrative concludes with his action taken after, assisted by the old boatman.

“Last night,” he says, proceeding with the relation, “or I ought to say this same mornin’ – for ’twar after midnight hour – Joe an’ myself took the skiff, an’ stole up to the chapel graveyard; where we opened her grave, an’ foun’ the coffin empty! Now, Captain, what do ye think o’ the whole thing?”

“On my word, I hardly know what to think of it. Mystery seems the measure of the time! This you tell me of is strange – if not stranger than any! What are your own thoughts about it, Jack?”

“Well, as I’ve already sayed, my thoughts be, an’ my hopes, that Mary’s still in the land o’ the livin’.”

“I hope she is.”

The tone of Ryecroft’s rejoinder tells of his incredulity, further manifested by his questions following.

“But you saw her in her coffin? Waked for two days, as I understood you; then laid in her grave? How could she have lived throughout all that? Surely she was dead!”

“So I thought at the time, but don’t now.”

“My good fellow, I fear you are deceiving yourself. I’m sorry having to think so. Why the body has been taken up again is of itself a sufficient puzzle; but alive – that seems physically impossible!”

“Well, Captain, it’s just about the possibility of the thing I come to ask your opinion; thinkin’ ye’d be acquainted wi’ the article itself.”

“What article?”

“The new medicine; it as go by the name o’ chloryform.”

“Ha! you have a suspicion – ”

“That she ha’ been chloryformed, an’ so kep’ asleep – to be waked up when they wanted her. I’ve heerd say, they can do such things.”

“But then she was drowned also? Fell from a foot plank, you told me? And was in the water some time?”

“I don’t believe it, a bit. It be true enough she got somehow into the water, an’ wor took out insensible, or rather drifted out o’ herself, on the bank just below, at the mouth o’ the brook. But that wor short after, an’ she might still a’ ben alive not with standin’. My notion be, that the priest had first put the chloryform into her, or did it then, an’ knew all along she warn’t dead, nohow.”

“My dear Jack, the thing cannot be possible. Even if it were, you seem to forget that her mother, father – all of them – must have been cognisant of these facts – if facts?”

“I don’t forget it, Captain. ’Stead I believe they all wor cognisant o’ them – leastways, the mother.”