“Oh, we can be hanged for sheep, Harry,” said Susannah. “Now we have disappeared, let us stay disappeared for today.”
“You will have to,” said Robert. “You cannot reach the hardway through the bay until very late tonight, and I think the tide will be in then.”
He, Everard, and Cecilia worked it out, and found he was right. Everard was delighted and arranged for them to stay at Falleyfell that night and cross the bay the following day. So one of Lord Tremath’s soldiers went galloping ahead to give Everard’s orders, and the others made a wonderful leisurely journey through the Principality in the snow.
They went to Endwait, and there Everard promised the astonished wheelwright and his wife that the deeds of the land should be sent to them in the course of the next three days. Then they went onto Gairne. There Lord Darron met them, and to Cecilia’s delight, he did show her one of the warehouses there. She and Susannah went into raptures over the beauty of the cloth.
“I would order bales of this,” Cecilia said to Robert, “if only I could explain to Father where it came from.”
Alex, who was still feeling cold and sick, went to see the castle with Harry and Everard. It was a splendid castle, just like the castle must have been on his island before it was ruined.
“No,” said Everard, “mine is a great deal bigger. I will show you. Are you well, Alex?”
Alex said he was, but he was beginning to think that the way he was feeling could not be merely fear of Josiah.
They went to Falleyfell, later that day, and arrived in time for the small, melancholy funeral of Princess Mathilda, Countess of Gairne. Alex, feeling sicker than ever in the chapel, was thankful that she had a proper funeral and not the kind Everard had described.
“Shall we say my law is already in force?” Everard said later. “I will backdate it.”
They did not see Robert again that evening. Susannah several times demanded loudly where he was, until Lord Darron took her aside and explained that the Princess was Robert’s mother. Susannah burst into tears. She would have cried all evening, if the doors of the great square hall had not slammed open at that moment.
“Oh!” she said to Harry. “It’s our lady!”
Princess Rosalind ran the whole length of the hall to kiss Everard. The two nuns with her looked a little shocked. When the Princess went on to kiss Susannah, Harry, Alex, and Cecilia, they looked at one another as much as to say, “This lady has no idea of dignity.” Then the Princess kissed Lord Darron and Lord Tremath too and the nuns left the hall.
Susannah remembered Lord Arbard and asked after him. She was told he was in his own mansion in Arbard, and feeling better already.
“I wish I was,” Alex thought.
He was a great deal worse the following morning, but he got up grimly, ready to ride home. Cecilia was horrified.
“He is not fit to go,” she said to Princess Rosalind.
Everard felt ill too. “It must have been those icicles we ate,” he said. “You cannot go until you are well.”
Alex insisted on going, though, and Harry backed him up. “It is not far,” they said. “And we must go home before they give us up for dead.”
So they set out for the coast. Robert went with them, still sad, until they reached the beginning of the hidden road. Then he turned back, with the horse Alex had borrowed from Everard, and the four Outsiders went on alone. Alex rode behind Harry. He was very glad to have an excuse to do so, because he felt so ill now that he could not have ridden alone. The brown sands swung and dipped around him and he shivered all the way. Cecilia wept all across the bay, and Harry and Susannah were hard put to it to keep cheerful.
They reached the Hornbys’ farm in the early afternoon. Josiah was there, and so was Sir Edmund, come to have the quicksands searched for their bodies. There was the most terrible scene. Alex felt as if he were drowning in a flood or a storm—he could hardly hear or see or feel, and he knew he was letting the others down. They gave up all the various explanations they had discussed on the way home and tried to tell what had really happened. Neither father believed a word.
“Alex,” said Josiah, “I know we’ll get truth out of you. Out with it, boy. Where have you all been?”
Alex began to say that what the others said was quite true. It was very difficult because his throat had forgotten how to talk. Then something strange happened. The room turned upside down and Alex was floating on the floor of Josiah’s study, looking down at the beams on the ceiling. He saw Susannah and Cecilia whisking about down there, talking to him. He thought they were trying to pull him down off the floor, but he did not want to move. He knew how flies felt walking on the ceiling and it was better than being down there with the others. Then Josiah surged in front of the girls. Alex shut his eyes and waited, but the next person who pulled at him was Miss Gatly. She plucked him down from the floor and carried him off to bed.
The oddest thing was that all the time there was part of Alex, a part just outside his head, over to the left, which knew perfectly well what was happening. This part knew that the terrible scene went on, worse than ever, when they found he was ill. Cecilia was getting all the blame for dragging her brother about in the snow when he had a high fever. Josiah told her he never wanted to set eyes on her again. Alex knew, somehow, that Josiah had made some money for himself in London, as well as some for the Courcys, and that Cecilia was to be sent to a finishing school in Switzerland with what he had made. Until then, she was to stay in her room.
Alex felt this was horribly unfair of Josiah. He tried to tell Miss Gatly what he thought as she fussed and rattled him into his bed. “It was my fault just as much—really.”
“Aye, love, but you mustn’t fret yourself. Unfair it may be that you should be the apple of your father’s eye and not your sister, but that’s how it always has been. Besides, you are sick and she is not.”
Alex gave up trying to protest and went into a long tunnel lined with horrible dreams. He dreamed of school and of Arnforth Hall and of the island, of the hidden road—which vanished and left him in the quicksands—and of Falleyfell and the Endwait dungeon. There, he wrestled for hours with Everard for the clasp-knife, and then, suddenly out in the cold snow, he galloped for hundreds of days after Robert, who was to help him rescue Harry’s pistol from Towerwood.
So he was not surprised, late that night, when he heard Robert’s voice outside in the farmyard.
“Because I could not stay away.”
He heard Cecilia crying, too, in her room next door to his, before stranger and more horrible dreams came to him. He shouted for Cecilia, but it was Miss Gatly who came, looking very worried and very sorry for him.
Alex was ill for a long time. He knew next to nothing of what went on in the farm. He wanted to see Cecilia, but she was not allowed to see him—he gathered that Miss Gatly had words with Josiah about that, but Josiah won. Alex tossed in bed at night with dreams, dreams often full of Robert’s voice and Cecilia crying.
Then, one evening, when Alex was at last getting better, there was an enormous din downstairs. Alex was woken up from a peaceful sleep by his father raging. Josiah was shouting. Alex could hear him throwing things. People were running about all over the house, calling out or shouting too. Whatever it was must have had something to do with Cecilia, because Alex heard Josiah raging at her. Cecilia was raging back, to Alex’s horror. It was a row such as he had never heard before in all his knowledge of his father’s rages. It was so terrible that Alex found himself getting out of bed, crying because he was so weak and ill, in order to stop it.
He got nearly to the door of his room, holding onto his bed and the wall. Then he had to rest before he went any farther. While he rested the noise stopped—Miss Gatly was talking. He heard Cecilia run along the passage outside and slam the door of her room. Miss Gatly was still talking. She came along the passage too, calling out to Cecilia and back downstairs to Josiah.
“If he has another relapse you can blame yourself, Josiah Hornby, for yo
ur wicked unbelieving ways.”
As she said that she came into Alex’s room and was horrified to find him out of bed. She rattled him back between the sheets double-quick and plumped his pillows with much cap shaking. “There, there, you shouldn’t fret,” she said, and, “It’ll be just as I said, let him see.”
Alex was trembling and shivering. “Please, what has happened?” he asked.
Miss Gatly stroked his forehead. “Nothing you need to worry about,” she said. “Your father’s seen a ghost, that’s all. And, as I always told him, it is those that will not believe in the dead walking that get the biggest fright when they see with their own eyes. Now you try to get to sleep.”
“But why did Cecilia—?”
“Ah, your father’s in a strange state of mind these days. Everything is her fault, it seems. And I cannot see what your sister has to do with a ghost. I told your father so too. Now—not another word, Alex. Drink this and try to sleep.”
Alex did sleep. After that the farm was quiet for a fortnight or more, while Alex slowly became stronger. He began to get up for most of the day and was allowed to sit in the parlor with a window open. He never saw Cecilia, not until the last day she was at home, and that made him very miserable. He found that she was to go to Switzerland almost at once, to stay for two years. Josiah was so kind to him that Alex was frightened and afraid Josiah thought he was going to die, but he went surly when Alex tried to mention Cecilia.
“That’ll do,” he would say.
Then, one day, he mentioned Cecilia himself. “She’s off tomorrow,” he said. “And good riddance to her. You can have your first outing to see her away if you want to. She wants you to. You can take the trap to the station with her if the weather holds fair.”
“Thank you,” said Alex, pleased and miserable at the same time.
Next morning, he met Cecilia in the farmyard, while John Britby was harnessing the pony. Josiah was not there. He had refused even to say good-bye to Cecilia.
Cecilia’s eyes had tears in them. She looked very flushed and nervous, Alex thought, until she saw him picking his way through the mud. Then she ran and put her arms around him.
“Oh, Alex, I am so grateful you were allowed to come!”
She seemed almost a stranger already, much, much more beautiful than Alex had remembered her and much more grown-up. She had on a new dull-pink outfit, with roses to match on her bonnet, which Alex had not seen before: clothes, he supposed, newly made for Switzerland.
“Now you are here,” Cecilia said, “perhaps we shall have time to talk at last. Are you strong enough to walk down the hill to the shore, while we wait for the trap?”
“Yes, of course,” Alex said. “I went down there yesterday with Mary-Ann.”
“Good,” said Cecilia. She took off one small pink glove to search in her little hanging bag, with roses on to match her bonnet. Alex saw her take five shillings out and hurriedly hand them to Old John. He grinned at her, winked at Alex, and tucked the money up in the pocket under his smock.
“Quarter of hour,” he said. “That’s the very slowest, miss. We’ll miss your train beyond that.”
“A quarter of an hour will do wonderfully,” said Cecilia. Then she took Alex’s hand and pulled him out of the farmyard and down the hill.
It was a truly beautiful day. The snow had gone while Alex was ill and, instead, there had been a month of mild, damp days. That day was almost like Spring. The sky was pale fresh blue and the wind was as warm and sweet-smelling as a wind in summer. There were snowdrops and crocuses on the sheltered parts of the hill where Alex and Cecilia walked, and in front of them the wet sands of the bay glittered in a way that made Alex joyful to look at them. He undid the scarf Miss Gatly had made him wear and trailed it in the wind as they crossed their own private railway-bridge and then the road. As they reached the big wet pebbles of the beach, the scarf fluttered like Lord Tremath’s long flag had done.
Cecilia stopped on the beach and turned, very seriously, to Alex. “My dear,” she said, “there have been a great many things I have been determined not to bother you with. I wanted you to get properly better, much as I wished to see you. I have tried—we have all tried—to make Father understand, but he will not.” Alex saw she was biting her lip, trying not to cry. “I—I think,” she said, “even so, I would have made one more effort. If I could have brought him here, we might have explained, with your help, but”—she dropped her one gloved hand toward the farmhouse—“he has refused even to say good-bye, and I shall have to grieve him terribly, because I think he must be a little fond of me. Tell him how grateful I was that he let me say good-bye to you, won’t you, Alex?”
Alex watched her carefully putting on her other pink glove and felt frightened and suddenly lonely. “I do not understand,” he said. There was a ring on her finger that he had not seen before, with a ruby in it which Josiah could certainly not have bought for her even if he sold half the farmlands. “What are you going to do, Cecil?”
Cecilia laughed, but not in a way which made Alex feel better. “What the poor Helvetii did,” she said. “Remember? I shall be wandering in Gairne when I should have been in Switzerland. Good-bye, Alex. Come and visit me when you can find an excuse. I shall be overjoyed to see you.”
She turned round, toward the bay, and stepped off the pebbles onto the dark wet sand.
Alex stumbled after her. “Cecilia! What are you going to do?”
Cecilia turned around, with the wind billowing her dress and catching her hair from inside her bonnet. “Alex,” she said, “you must not be upset. We are relying on you to comfort Father. As for what I am going to do, I thought you must have realized. I am going to be Countess of Gairne.”
Alex had not a word to say. He felt as if the sky had turned dark gray and the sands black. All he could do was to watch Cecilia as she set out bravely across the bay for the third and last time, plowing through the mud in her dainty new shoes as if she hardly knew where she was treading. She was going diagonally across the bay, straight toward the quicksands. She was out of hearing when Alex shouted “Good-bye!” He sat down on the hard wet pebbles, so lonely and dreary, and still so weak from his illness, that he was in tears. He could hardly see Cecilia’s tiny pink figure.
There were sounds behind him, as if someone were riding along the shore. Alex could not turn around, because of his tears.
Susannah said: “She is away, then. I did not think she would go, in the end.”
Alex nodded, but he still could not turn round.
“Poor, poor Alex!” Susannah knelt beside him, with her arms around him. He realized that Harry was standing on the other side of him, carefully not looking at him, until he felt better.
“We came to see her off,” Harry said. “The rest of us are at the station.”
“Where,” said Susannah, “they will have to wait a long time.”
This idea amused Alex so much that he managed to smile at her, and then at Harry. “How—how do you know all about this?” he asked. Although he smiled, he felt forlorn and resentful, because no one had told him anything.
“Through much coming and going,” Susannah said cheerfully. “Harry and I have been to the island, you know. We saw it all. The castle is perfectly whole and twice the size of the one at Gairne.”
“Is it?” Alex said and felt utterly left out. What friends they must be with Everard, he thought, to see all over the island.
Harry began to explain, perhaps because he saw how Alex was feeling. “Robert came to Arnforth,” he said, “after he had tried to talk to your father. He asked for Cecilia’s hand, you see, but your father seemed to think he was a ghost. I tried to talk to your father—and explain—but he simply lost his temper. He called me such things, Alex, that if he hadn’t saved us all from beggary, I would have told my father.”
“Saved you from beggary!” said Alex.
“Yes,” said Susannah. “Without him, we would be sold up by now, it seems, but that does not make him any more lik
eable, to my mind. Oh, Alex! we did wish you were well and able to help! You are the only person whom your father would have listened to—and now it is too late.”
Alex was surprised. He had never imagined he had the slightest influence with Josiah. He could not believe it. He looked out at Cecilia. She was now nearly halfway to the point where the river channel crossed the hidden hardway. “Would I have been any use?” he said.
“Oh, yes,” said Harry. “Everard sent for us to persuade us to talk to you, but Cecilia would not have you worried. She was afraid you would die if we pestered you with this, and Robert agreed with her.”
“Oh!” said Alex.
“But,” said Susannah, “we are relying on you now, because you will have to break it to your father. We do not think he will believe what has happened. We are afraid he will have to be told that Cecilia is drowned in the quicksands.”
“No,” said Alex. “I shall have to try to tell him the truth.” He stood up, with his hands in his pockets, and looked out again at Cecilia. She was nearly at the channel, now. He was suddenly afraid that she really was going to be drowned. “Why did I not stop her?” he thought.
“Here he comes,” said Harry, pointing over to the island.
Alex looked over at the clump of bare trees. A horse came slowly down from among them as he looked. The sun caught the gold on its bridle, and brightened the rider’s long orange cloak. It was certainly Robert. He was riding along the hardway at a pace which would bring him to Cecilia just as she reached the river.
Susannah said to Harry: “Give Alex Everard’s letter to read while we wait.”
Harry smiled. He took a little scroll from the front of his coat and handed it to Alex with a low courtly bow. “A letter from the Prince, my lord,” he said, and laughed. “You are lucky to be such a friend of his, Alex.”
The scroll was fastened with a big green seal. Alex, not used to the way of it, took some time to get it unfastened. He unrolled a glory of painted leopards, lions, and fleurs-de-lis clustered at the head of the parchment. Underneath, Everard’s round, schoolboy’s writing looked a little out of place, even though the letters were not written as Alex would write them. Everard wrote:
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