CHAPTER XV
THE STROKE
As she lay, listening, through the black darkness and the singing of thesea came a faint sound as of something dragging itself along the sand atthe cave entrance. She clutched the knife and sat up. A waft of windbrought with it a tang of stale tobacco and rain-wet clothes. It was LaTouche.
She drew up her feet and sat crouched against the sailcloth, the knifehalf-held in her lap, her fingers nerveless, her mind paralysed with theknowledge that now, immediately, she would _have_ to fight, that theBeast was all but upon her. She knew.
She could hear him breathing now and the faint sound of his handsfeeling gently over the floor of the cave. He was searching for her, thefume of him filled the place, he was almost in touch with her, yet stillshe sat helpless as a little child, paralysed in the blackness, as abird before a crawling cat. Yet her right hand as though endowed with avolition of its own was tightening its grasp upon the hilt of the knife.
She had no longer reasoning power. Reasoning power and energy seemednow in the possession of the knife.
Then something touched her left boot and at the touch her hand struckout into the darkness, blindly and furiously, driving the knife home tothe hilt in something that fell with a choking sound across her feet.She forced her feet from the thing that had suddenly fallen on them,rose, sprang across it and passed through the cave entrance with thesurety of a person moving in broad daylight.
Then the pouring rain on her face brought her to her full senses andrecognition of what had happened.
The knife was still in her hand and her hand was sticky and damp.
She said to herself: "That is his blood." The thought that perhaps shehad killed him did not occur to her. The fear of him was still sointense, that it made him alive, alive somewhere in the surroundingdarkness, and waiting to seize her. Then she began to steal off towardsthe sound of the sea. Twice as she went she stopped and turned, ready tostrike again, then when the water was washing round her feet she came upthe beach a few paces and crouched down.
The sea was at her back and the haunting dread of being followedvanished.
It was now that she asked herself the question: "Have I killed him?"Meaning:--"Have I freed myself of him,"--hoping this was so.
The terror behind her having vanished she was now brave. It seemed toher that the sound of the sea had become sharper; then she realized thatthe sound of the rain had ceased. Her mind seemed working in a dualmanner and she had not fully recognized the cessation of the rain tillthe sound of the sea clinched the fact.
Through the clear night now came the melancholy crying of the whalebirds, and through the broken clouds a ray of the moon shewed a faintlight in which the cliffs began to stand out.
The incoming tide washed round her so that she had to move, it seemeddetermined to drive her up to the caves. She could see now the wholebeach desolate of life and before her, vaguely sketched in the cliffwall, the cave openings.
She came along the sea edge till she reached the break in the cliffs,then, looking behind her again to make sure, she took refuge in thebushes.
For the last few yards before reaching them she seemed wading throughtides of nothingness. In the shelter of the bushes she forgoteverything.