No, she cried; it cant be. My darling, dont leave me here alone in the weary world. Isaac, my own! My God! hes dead.
She reeled, caught at the table to save herself, the ill-supported candle dropped from the stick, and she fell with a thud upon the floor, as the candle rolled from the table close to her face, flickered for a few moments to display its ghastly lineaments, and then died out.
But it was not quite dark.
A faint light stole in beside the drawn-down blind, the chill air of morning sighed round the house, and a low murmur came from the waves fretting among the broken granite far below; and it was as if the night, too, were dead, and the low sigh died away in a hushed silence.
Then pink, pink, pink, pink came the sharp cry of the blackbird from the tangle of bramble and whortleberry high up the cliff slope, and from the grassy level above, the clear loud song of the lark, as it rose high in the pale morning sky, telling that come sorrow come joy, the world still goes round, and that Nature will have her way, even though murder be on the wing.
Volume One Chapter Eight. Claude Opens the Awful Door
Hers had been no romantic life. Hard working servant for years at the Fort, till, in
a dry, matter-of-fact way, Isaac Woodham, quarryman, and local preacher at the little chapel, and one of the most narrow-minded and bigoted of his sect, had cast his eyes upon her in the chapel and preached to her. He had selected his texts from various parts of the Bible, where it was related that certain men took unto themselves wives, and when he was at work he told himself that Sarah was comely to look upon, and that one of these days he would marry her.
And so it was that previously, on one of these days when he had to go on business to the Fort, he had told the woman in his hard, matter-of-fact way that he had prayed for guidance, and that he felt it was his duty and her duty that they two should wed.
Sarah, in her hard, matter-of-fact way, asked for time to consider the matter herself, and at the end of a years cold, business-like term of probation, she gave Isaac Woodham her hand, left the Fort, and went to live at one of the quarry cottages, which became at once the most spotless in the stone-cutters hamlet by the sea.
They neither of them ever displayed any great affection one for the other, but led a quiet, childless, orderly life, in which she with no pleasant recollections of her sojourn at the Fort, but still with a deep, almost motherly kind of affection for the girl whom she had seen grow up to womanhood listened to and sided with her husband in his harsh revilings of his tyrant.
It was Isaac Woodhams never-failing theme his hatred of his master, whom he looked upon with the bitter, narrow-minded envy of his nature. Every sharp word was magnified, every business order was looked upon as an insulting piece of tyranny, and after obeying in a morose, sulky way, he took his revenge by pitying the owner of the quarry, and praying that he might repent and become a better man.
This went on for years, during which Norman Gartram did not repent after his servants ideas of repentance; and had he known the circumstances, he would have said he had nothing to repent of, which, as far as his men were concerned, was perfectly just his greatest sins being the insistence upon receiving a fair return for the wages he paid, and a rather stern way of giving his orders to all, Woodham being the most trusted for his sterling honesty, albeit Gartram sneered at him as being full of cant.
Then came the catastrophe, with Sarah, the newly-made widow, in her bereavement, feeling that in her hard way she had dearly loved the cold, stern man who had been her husband those last few years; and then she shivered as she thought of the oath he had exacted from her, and felt that it was an order from the unseen world.
Her husband had nursed indifference into hatred, till she was as bitter against Gartram as he was himself; and years passed as the sharer of his troubles had made her so much akin that, like her husband, she was full of the bitter letter of the old Scriptures, without the under-current of the spirit of forgiveness and love.
And so it was that she sat there low in spirit, thinking of the few short hours that would elapse before friends would come and bear away the cold, stern-faced form of him who had been her all, straight to the little chapel-yard, with its rough granite walls, beyond the quarry, where he would be laid to rest, well within hearing of the waves, which would lull him in his long sleep, and near to where all day long rang out the crack of the heavy stone hammers, the ring of the tamping irons, and from time to time the sharp report and the following roar of some charge when a mass of the titanic granite was laid low.
Only a few days could elapse, she thought, before, in obedience to the new orders of a cruel master, she would have to leave the carefully kept cottage which had been her pride the only pride to which she gave harbour in her breast.