Page:Unto the Third and Fourth Generation.pdf/8

 , I saw her face. It was a horrible shock. The face bore an ugly resemblance to the face of Lucy. When I looked again the woman was gone.

I recovered myself and called after her. Her footsteps were rapidly going off in the darkness.

“Wait,” I cried, and I swung round to follow. I saw the woman turn in at the gate of Clousedale Hall.

“Wait,” I cried again, and I hastened my steps. When I reached the avenue the footsteps had ceased, and the dark figure had disappeared. There was no noise but the creaking of the bare boughs of the trees overhead.

I returned to the house, and with both fists struck heavily on the door. It was opened this time by Mrs. Hill herself. She looked like a woman distracted.

“Mrs. Hill,” I said, “I am sorry to be rude, but I demand to see Miss Clousedale—I must see her instantly!”

She burst out crying, and I stepped into the house. Then I observed that the whole place was in disorder. The servants, with candles in their hands, were running up and down stairs and in and out of rooms on the ground floor.

“Where shall I find her?”

At that the poor old soul made a clean breast of it. Lucy had gone out of the house. They had been keeping her a prisoner and watching her constantly, but she had escaped. Snatching the opportunity of Mrs. Hill's absence at the moment of my call, Lucy had slipped away, and nobody knew what had become of her.

“Good Lord Almighty!” I thought, “then it must have been she!”

I was outside again in a moment, running towards the gate. I thought I heard something passing me in the darkness. I stopped and stretched my arms toward the sound, but there was nothing there. Then I heard a rustle, as of a woman's dress along the grass, dying off in the direction of the house. At the next moment I saw distinctly a female figure moving across the windows, where flickering lights were coming and going.

I ran after her and overtook her. She was throwing up the sash of a bay window, and creeping through, when I caught her tightly in my arms.

“Who are you?” I cried, and she gave a smothered cry of—

“Let me go, let me go!”

“Not till I know who you are!”

“Let me go!”

“Who are you?”

Our voices had drawn the servants, and they came running into the room with their candles. Then I saw the face of the woman whom I held in my arms.

It was Lucy—Lucy my love, my dear one, my wife that was to be—Lucy Clousedale, the beloved of everybody, the saintly soul, the generous heart, the sweet and beautiful flower of girlhood just budding into womanhood—and I knew that she was a poor, wretched dipsomaniac under the terrors of an inherited curse!

 IV.

day I was back at the Temple, yet before leaving Cumberland I heard the whole pitiful story from the nurse. Until after her return from London Lucy had never touched intoxicating drink. But London had exhausted her. The new scene, the new life, our engagement and our parting, had played upon her nerves, and she had begun to show symptoms of hysteria. Then the doctor had ordered egg and brandy twice daily to build up the burned out nervous system. The nurse had been horrified. She had reminded him of the death of Lucy's father and grandfather, and of the curse that hung over the family. The doctor had only laughed. Did she expect any sensible man of modern ideas to be influenced in his practice by such foolish superstitions? The young lady required a stimulant, and she must have it.

Within a fortnight Lucy had become the slave of her medicine. She took it, not twice daily, but four times, six times, ten times. An unquenchable thirst possessed her, a burning fever, an insatiable craving. The doctor had begun to talk of latent alcoholism in the blood, and to treat his patient as if she had been a mad woman. An acute attack of two days' duration had ended in convulsions, and then my darling had been herself again. The thirst, the fever, the crave, had gone, leaving her well, though weak and faint.

But the poison had been subdued, not expelled. Three months later the crave had returned, the former symptoms had been renewed, and the same agony gone through. The attack had lasted longer this time, and the prostration that followed had been greater.

When the crave came back for the third time it was within two months of the second attack, and that was the hapless period into which my visit had fallen. Such was the miserable story of my dear one's abject 