I despatched 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 further 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 sandbank, 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. I fell 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.’ No! the words wouldn’t come. The dumb trembling held me in its grip. I couldn’t feel the driving rain. I couldn’t see the rising tide. As in the vision of a dream, the poor lost creature came back before me. I saw her again as I had seen her in the past time—on the morning when I went to fetch her into the house. I heard her again, telling me that the Shivering Sand seemed to draw her to it against her will, and wondering whether her grave was waiting for her there. The horror of it struck at me, in some unfathomable way, through my own child. My girl was just her age. My girl, tried as Rosanna was tried, might have lived that miserable life, and died this dreadful death.
The Sergeant kindly lifted me up, and turned me away from the sight of the place where she had perished.
With that relief, I began to fetch my breath again, and to see things about me, as things really were. Looking towards the sand-hills, I saw the men-servants from out-of-doors, and the fisherman, named Yolland, all running down to us together; and all, having taken the alarm, calling out to know if the girl had been found. In the fewest words, the Sergeant showed them the evidence of the footmarks, and told them that a fatal accident must have happened to her. He then picked out the fisherman from the rest, and put a question to him, turning about again towards the sea: ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Could a boat have taken her off, in such weather as this, from those rocks where her footmarks stop?’
The fisherman pointed to the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and to the great waves leaping up in clouds of foam against the headlands on either side of us.
‘No boat that ever was built,’ he answered, ‘could have got to her through that.’
Sergeant Cuff looked for the last time at the footmarks on the sand, which the rain was now fast blurring out.
‘There,’ he said, ‘is the evidence that she can’t have left this place by land. And here,’ he went on, looking at the fisherman, ‘is the evidence that she can’t have got away by sea.’ He stopped, and considered for a minute. ‘She was seen running towards this place, half an hour before I got here from the house,’ he said to Yolland. ‘Some time has passed since then. Call it, altogether, an hour ago. How high would the water be, at that time, on this side of the rocks?’ He pointed to the south side—otherwise, the side which was not filled up by the quicksand.
‘As the tide makes to-day,’ said the fisherman, ‘there wouldn’t have been water enough to drown a kitten on that side of the Spit, an hour since.’
Sergeant Cuff turned about northward, towards the quicksand.
‘How much on this side?’ he asked.
‘Less still,’ answered Yolland. ‘The Shivering Sand would have been just awash, and no more.’
The Sergeant turned to me, and said that the accident must have happened on the side of the quicksand. My tongue was loosened at that. ‘No accident!’ I told him. ‘When she came to this place, she came, weary of her life, to end it here.’
He started back from me. ‘How do you know?’ he asked. The rest of them crowded round. The Sergeant recovered himself instantly. He put them back from me; he said I was an old man; he said the discovery had shaken me; he said, ‘Let him alone a little.’ Then he turned to Yolland, and asked, ‘Is there any chance of finding her, when the tide ebbs again?’ And Yolland answered. ‘None. What the Sand gets, the Sand keeps for ever.’ Having said that, the fisherman came a step nearer, and addressed himself to me.
‘Mr. Betteredge,’ he said, ‘I have a word to say to you about the young woman’s death. Four foot out, broad-wise, along the side of the Spit, there’s a shelf of rock, about half fathom down under the sand. My question is—why didn’t she strike that? If she slipped, by accident, from off the Spit, she fell in where there’s foothold at the bottom, at a depth that would barely cover her to the waist. She must have waded out, or jumped out, into the Deeps beyond—or she wouldn’t be missing now. No accident, sir! The Deeps of the Quicksand have got her. And they have got her by her own act.’
After that testimony from a man whose knowledge was to be relied on, the Sergeant was silent. The rest of us, like him, held our peace. With one accord, we all turned back up the slope of the beach.
At the sand-hillocks we were met by the under-groom, running to us from the house. The lad is a good lad, and has an honest respect for me. He handed me a little note, with a decent sorrow in his face. ‘Penelope sent me with this, Mr. Betteredge,’ he said. ‘She found it in Rosanna’s room.’