When he looked up from gazing into the pool the whole world seemed to have changed.He was still dazzled perhaps by the reflection of the water in his eyes,and yet it was not altogether that.It was not altogether because the day was slipping from afternoon into evening.
The lazy ripple of the water as it slutched up the sand and then broke,the shadows that were creeping farther and farther from rock to rock,the green light that pushed up from the horizon into the faint blue,the grey web of the sea,the thick gathering of the hills as they crept more closely about the little darkening beach .it was none of these things.
He began hurriedly to tell Charlotte about the Scarlet Admiral.Even as he told her he was himself caught into the excitement of the narration.He forgot her;he did not see her white cheeks,her mouth open with terror,an expression new to her,that her face had never known before,stealing into her eyes.He told her how the Fool had seen the ship,how the Admiral had landed,then left his men on the beach,how he had climbed the little green path,how the young man had followed him,how they had fought,how the young man had fallen.
What was that?Jeremy jumped from his rock."I say,did you hear anything?"And that was enough for Charlotte.With one scream,a scream such as she had never uttered in her life before,sue turned,and then,running as indeed she had never run before,she stumbled,half fell,stumbled,finally ran as though the whole world of her ghosts was behind her.Her screams were so piercing that they may well have startled,the villagers of Rafiel.
Jeremy followed her,but his mind was not with her.Was he going to see something?What was it?Who was it?
Then the awful catastrophe that finished the afternoon occurred.
Turning the corner of the rock,Charlotte missed her footing and fell straight into a pool.Jeremy,Mary and Helen were upon her almost as she fell.They dragged her out,but alas!what a sight was there!Instead of the beautiful and magnificent Charlotte there was a bedraggled and dirty little girl.
But also,instead of an inanimate and lifeless doll,there was at last a human being,a terrified soul.
The scene that followed passes all power of deion.Mrs.Le Page wailed like a lost spirit;Mr.Le Page was so rude to Mr.Cole that it might confidently be said that those two gentlemen would never speak to one another again.Mrs.Cole,dismayed though she was,had some fatalistic consolation that she had known from the first that the picnic would be a most dreadful failure and that the worst had occurred;there was no more to come.
Everyone was too deeply occupied to scold Jeremy.They all moved up to the farm,Charlotte behaving most strangely,even striking her mother and crying:"Let me go!Let me go!I don't want to be clean!
I'm frightened!I'm frightened!"
Jeremy hung behind the others.At the bottom of the little lane he stood and waited.Was there a figure coming up through the dusk?Did someone pass him?Why did he suddenly feel no longer afraid,but only reassured and with the strangest certainty that the lane,the beach,the field belonged to him now?He would come there and live when he grew up.He would come often.Had the Scarlet Admiral passed him?If not the Scarlet Admiral,then the other.
The sea picnic had,after all,been not quite a misfortune.
Jeremy had been made free of the land.
And Charlotte?Charlotte had been woken up,and never would go to sleep again.