Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/266

254 I reflected for a moment. Then turned to Luke.

“Do you think you can find your way to Rudd?”

The girl interposed.

“Let me go; I shall be surer—and quicker.”

“You can’t go alone; they won’t take their orders from you.” An idea occurred to me. “I’ll come with you, and we’ll take as many things with us as we can carry. Luke, you stay behind and help Mr. Batters put the things together in convenient parcels. I doubt if there’ll be enough of us to take everything. Pick out the best. As time’s precious, what we can’t take we shall have to leave behind.”

I crammed my pockets with the smaller odds and ends, none the less valuable, perhaps, because they were small. I packed a lot of other things into a sort of sheet which I slung over my shoulder. The girl stowed as much as she could carry into the skirt of her queer fashioned gown. She held it up as children do their pinafores. Out we went into the night.

As we hurried along my breath came faster even than the pace warranted at the thought of being alone in the darkness with her.

We went some way before a word was spoken. Then I asked a question.

“Do you want to go to England?”

“Want!” She gave a sigh, as of longing. “I have wanted ever since I was born.”

“Then you shall go whoever has to stay behind.”

“Stay behind—how do you mean?” She seemed to read in my words a hidden significance. “My father must go. If he stays I stay also.”

“Is he really your father?”

“Of course he is my father. My mother was one of the women of the country. They burned her when I was born.”

“Burned her?”

“As a thank offering for having borne unto the Great Joss a child.”