The Call of the Blood

"Wait in the road--wait in the road." She kept on saying that to herself.

But she could not remember for a moment where the road was. She could

only think of rock, of water black like ebony. The road was white. She

must look for something white. And when she found it she must wait.

Presently, while she thought she was looking, she found that she was

walking in the dust. It flew up into her nostrils, dry and acrid. Then

she began to recover herself and to realize more clearly what she was

doing.

She did not know yet. She knew nothing yet. The night was dark, the sea

was dark. Gaspare had only cast one swift glance down before his foot had

slipped. It was impossible that he could have seen what it was that was

there in the water. And she was always inclined to let her imagination

run riot. God isn't cruel. She had said that under the oak-trees, and it

was true. It must be true.

"I've never done God any harm," she was saying to herself now. "I've

never meant to. I've always tried to do the right thing. God knows that!

God wouldn't be cruel to me."

In this moment all the subtlety of her mind deserted her, all that in her

might have been called "cleverness." She was reduced to an extraordinary

simplicity like that of a child, or a very instinctive, uneducated

person.

"I don't think I'm bad," she thought. "And God--He isn't bad. He wouldn't

wish to hurt me. He wouldn't wish to kill me."

She was walking on mechanically while she thought this, but presently

she remembered again that Gaspare had told her to wait in the road. She

looked over the wall down to the narrow strip of beach that edged the

inlet between the main-land and the Sirens' Isle. The boat which she had

seen there was gone. Gaspare had taken it. She stood staring at the place

where the boat had been. Then she sought a means of descending to that

strip of beach. She would wait there. A little lower down the road some

of the masonry of the wall had been broken away, perhaps by a winter

flood, and at this point there was a faint track, trodden by fishermen's

feet, leading down to the line. Hermione got over the wall at this point

and was soon on the beach, standing almost on the spot where Maurice had

stripped off his clothes in the night to seek the voice that had cried

out to him in the darkness. She waited here. Gaspare would presently come

back. His arms were strong. He could row fast. She would only have to

wait a few minutes. In a few minutes she would know. She strained her

eyes to catch sight of the boat rounding the promontory as it returned

from the open sea. At first she stood, but presently, as the minutes went

by and the boat did not come, her sense of physical weakness returned and

she sat down on the stones with her feet almost touching the water.