"Maryllia! Dearest, do you know me?"
She stared vaguely, and a faint smile hovered about her lips. Then her brows suddenly knitted into a perplexed, pained frown, and she said quite clearly-"It was Oliver Leach!"
Cicely gave a little cry. The nurse warned her into silence by a gesture. There was a pause. Maryllia looked from one to the other wistfully.
"It was not Cleo's fault," she went on, speaking slowly, but distinctly--"Cleo never missed. Oliver Leach took the hedge just behind us. It was wrong! He meant to kill me. I saw it in his face!" She shuddered violently, and her eyelids closed. "He was cruel-- cruel!" she murmured feebly--"But I was too happy!"
She drifted again into a stupor,--and Cicely, her whole soul awakened by these broken words into a white heat of wrath and desire for vengeance, left the room with sufficient information to set the whole village in an uproar. Oliver Leach! In less than four-and- twenty hours, the news was all over the place. The spreading wave of indignation soon rose to an overwhelming high tide, and had Leach shown himself anywhere in or near the village he would have stood an uncommonly good chance of being first horsewhipped, and then 'ducked' in the river by an excited crowd. Oliver Leach! The hated, petty upstart who had ground down the Abbot's Manor tenantry to the very last penny that could be wrested from them!--who had destroyed old cherished land-marks, and made ugly havoc in many once fair woodland places in order to put money in his own pocket,--even he, so long an object of aversion among them, was the would-be murderer of the last descendant of the Vancourts! The villagers talked of nothing else,--quiet and God-fearing rustics as they were, they had no patience with treachery, meanness and cowardice, and were the last kind of people in the world to hold their peace on a matter of wickedness or injustice, merely because Leach was in the employ of several neighbouring land-owners, including Sir Morton Pippitt. Murmurs and threats ran from mouth to mouth, and Walden when he heard of it, said nothing for, or against, their clamour for revenge. The rage and sorrow of his own soul were greater than the wrath of combined hundreds,--and his feeling was all the more deep and terrible because it found no expression in words. The knowledge that such a low and vile creature as Oliver Leach had been the cause, and possibly the intentional cause of Maryllia's grievous suffering and injury, moved him to realise for the first time in his life what it was to be conscious of a criminal impulse. He himself longed to kill the wretch who had brought such destruction on a woman's beauty and happiness!--and it was with a curious sort of satisfaction that he found himself called upon in the ordinary course of things to read at evening service during the first week in January, the Twenty-eighth Psalm, wherein David beseeches God to punish the ungodly.