T HE news of Rosanna's disappearance had, as it appeared, spread among the out-of-door servants.They too had made their inquiries;and they had just laid hands on a quick little imp, nick-named `Duffy'
-- who was occasionally employed in weeding the garden, and who had seen Rosanna Spearman as lately as half an hour since.Duffy was certain that the girl had passed him in the fir-plantation, not walking, but running , in the direction of the sea-shore.
`Does this boy know the coast hereabouts?' asked Sergeant Cuff.
`He has been born and bred on the coast,' I answered.
`Duffy!' says the Sergeant, `do you want to earn a shilling? If you do, come along with me.Keep the pony-chaise ready, Mr.Betteredge, till I come back.'
He started for the Shivering Sand, at a rate that my legs (though well enough preserved for my time of life) had no hope of matching.Little Duffy, as the way is with the young savages in our parts when they are in high spirits, gave a howl, and trotted off at the Sergeant's heels.
Here again, I find it impossible to give anything like a clear account of the state of my mind in the interval after Sergeant Cuff had left us.
A curious and stupefying restlessness got possession of me.I did a dozen different needless things in and out of the house, not one of which I can now remember.I don't even know how long it was after the Sergeant had gone to the sands, when Duffy came running back with a message for me.
Sergeant Cuff had given the boy a leaf torn out of his pocket-book, on which was written in pencil, `Send me one of Rosanna Spearman's boots, and be quick about it.'
I dispatched the first woman-servant I could find to Rosanna's room;and I sent the boy back to say that I myself would follow him with the boot.
This, I am well aware, was not the quickest way to take of obeying the directions which I had received.But I was resolved to see for myself what new mystification was going on, before I trusted Rosanna's boot in the Sergeant's hands.My old notion of screening the girl, if I could, seemed to have come back on me again, at the eleventh hour.This state of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as soon as I had got the boot, at the nearest approach to a run which a man turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.
As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered black, and the rain came down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind.I heard the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the mouth of the bay.A little farther on, I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee of the sand-hills.Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one solitary black figure standing on it -- the figure of Sergeant Cuff.
He waved his hand towards the north, when he first saw me.`Keep on that side!' he shouted.`And come on down here to me!'
I went down to him, choking for breath, with my heart leaping as if it was like to leap out of me.I was past speaking.I had a hundred questions to put to him; and not one of them would pass my lips.His face frightened me.I saw a look in his eyes which was a look of horror.He snatched the boot out of my hand, and set it in a footmark on the sand, bearing south from us as we stood, and pointing straight towards the rocky ledge called the South Spit.The mark was not yet blurred out by the rain -- and the girl's boot fitted it to a hair.
The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the footmark, without saying a word.
I caught at his arm, and tried to speak to him, and failed as I had failed when I tried before.He went on, following the footsteps down and down to where the rocks and the sand joined.The South Spit was just awash with the flowing tide; the waters heaved over the hidden face of the Shivering Sand.Now this way and now that, with an obstinate patience that was dreadful to see, Sergeant Cuff tried the boot in the footsteps, and always found it pointing the same way -- straight to the rocks.Hunt as he might, no sign could he find anywhere of the footsteps walking from them.
He gave it up at last.Still keeping silence, he looked again at me;and then he looked out at the waters before us, heaving in deeper and deeper over the quicksand.I looked where he looked -- and I saw his thought in his face.A dreadful dumb trembling crawled all over me on a sudden.Ifell upon my knees on the beach.
`She has been back at the hiding-place,' I heard the Sergeant say to himself.`Some fatal accident has happened to her on those rocks.'
The girl's altered looks, and words, and actions -- the numbed, deadened way in which she listened to me, and spoke to me -- when I had found her sweeping the corridor but a few hours since, rose up in my mind, and warned me, even as the Sergeant spoke, that his guess was wide of the dreadful truth.I tried to tell him of the fear that had frozen me up.I tried to say, `The death she has died, Sergeant, was a death of her own seeking.'