Any hope or attempt to rescue Sandy was out of
the question; to dive into that whirlpool of mad water meant instant
death, and even had it been possible for any swimmer to live there, in
the blackness of the night there was absolutely no chance of finding
him. Besides, even if it had been possible to save him, I doubt whether
I was sufficiently master of my flesh and blood as to endure to plunge
where that apparition had risen. Then, as we lay there, another horror filled and possessed my mind. Somewhere close to us in the darkness was that woman whose yelling voice
just now had made my blood run ice-cold, while it brought the streaming
sweat to my forehead. At that moment I turned to Hugh. “I cannot stop here,” I said. “I must run, run right away. Where is
She?”

“Did you not see?” he asked. “No. What happened?”

“The lightning struck the stone within a few inches of where she was
standing. We--we must go and look for her.”

I followed him down the slope, shaking as if I had the palsy, and
groping with my hands on the ground in front of me, in deadly terror of
encountering something human. The thunder-clouds had in the last few
minutes spread over the moon, so that no ray from the window in the rock
guided our search. But up and down the bank from the stone that lay
shattered there to the edge of the pool we groped and stumbled, but
found nothing. At length we gave it up: it seemed morally certain that
she, too, had rolled down the bank after the lightning stroke, and lay
somewhere deep in the pool from which she had called the dead. None fished the pool next day, but men with drag-nets came from Brora. Right under the rock in the backwater lay two bodies, close together,
Sandy and the dead girl. Of the other they found nothing. *       *       *       *       *

It would seem, then, that Catrine Gordon, in answer to Sandy’s letter,
left Inverness in heavy trouble. What happened afterwards can only be
conjectured, but it seems likely she took the short cut to Gavon,
meaning to cross the river on the boulders above the Picts’ pool. But
whether she slipped accidentally in her passage, and so was drawn down
by the hungry water, or whether, unable to face the future, she had
thrown herself into the pool, we can only guess. In any case they sleep
together now in the bleak, wind-swept graveyard at Brora, in obedience
to the inscrutable designs of God. THE CONFESSION OF CHARLES LINKWORTH


Dr Teesdale had occasion to attend the condemned man once or twice
during the week before his execution, and found him, as is often the
case, when his last hope of life has vanished, quiet and perfectly
resigned to his fate, and not seeming to look forward with any dread to
the morning that each hour that passed brought nearer and nearer. The
bitterness of death appeared to be over for him: it was done with when
he was told that his appeal was refused. But for those days while hope
was not yet quite abandoned, the wretched man had drank of death daily. In all his experience the doctor had never seen a man so wildly and
passionately tenacious of life, nor one so strongly knit to this
material world by the sheer animal lust of living. Then the news that
hope could no longer be entertained was told him, and his spirit passed
out of the grip of that agony of torture and suspense, and accepted the
inevitable with indifference. Yet the change was so extraordinary that
it seemed to the doctor rather that the news had completely stunned his
powers of feeling, and he was below the numbed surface, still knit into
material things as strongly as ever. He had fainted when the result was
told him, and Dr Teesdale had been called in to attend him. But the fit
was but transient, and he came out of it into full consciousness of what
had happened. The murder had been a deed of peculiar horror, and there was nothing of
sympathy in the mind of the public towards the perpetrator. Charles
Linkworth, who now lay under capital sentence, was the keeper of a small
stationery store in Sheffield, and there lived with him his wife and
mother. The latter was the victim of his atrocious crime; the motive of
it being to get possession of the sum of five hundred pounds, which was
this woman’s property. Linkworth, as came out at the trial, was in debt
to the extent of a hundred pounds at the time, and during his wife’s
absence from home, on a visit to relations, he strangled his mother, and
during the night buried the body in the small back-garden of his house. On his wife’s return, he had a sufficiently plausible tale to account
for the elder Mrs Linkworth’s disappearance, for there had been constant
jarrings and bickerings between him and his mother for the last year or
two, and she had more than once threatened to withdraw herself and the
eight shillings a week which she contributed to household expenses, and
purchase an annuity with her money. It was true, also, that during the
younger Mrs Linkworth’s absence from home, mother and son had had a
violent quarrel arising originally from some trivial point in household
management, and that in consequence of this, she had actually drawn her
money out of the bank, intending to leave Sheffield next day and settle
in London where she had friends. That evening she told him this, and
during the night he killed her. His next step, before his wife’s return, was logical and sound. He
packed up all his mother’s possessions and took them to the station,
from which he saw them despatched to town by passenger train, and in the
evening he asked several friends in to supper, and told them of his
mother’s departure. He did not (logically also, and in accordance with
what they probably already knew) feign regret, but said that he and she
had never got on well together, and that the cause of peace and
quietness was furthered by her going. He told the same story to his wife
on her return, identical in every detail, adding, however, that the
quarrel had been a violent one, and that his mother had not even left
him her address. This again was wisely thought of: it would prevent his
wife from writing to her. She appeared to accept his story completely:
indeed there was nothing strange or suspicious about it. For a while he behaved with the composure and astuteness which most
criminals possess up to a certain point, the lack of which, after that,
is generally the cause of their detection. He did not, for instance,
immediately pay off his debts, but took into his house a young man as
lodger, who occupied his mother’s room, and he dismissed the assistant
in his shop, and did the entire serving himself. This gave the
impression of economy, and at the same time he openly spoke of the great
improvement in his trade, and not till a month had passed did he cash
any of the bank-notes which he had found in a locked drawer in his
mother’s room. Then he changed two notes of fifty pounds and paid off
his creditors. At that point his astuteness and composure failed him.