XI
EMILY leaned at evening against the casement of the western window in her room upstairs. The rain had ceased, and though the clouds were still as gray and cold as stone, the air was becoming luminous, and from somewhere had received a new inspiration, fresh and pure and light. As she gazed listlessly away across the vacant lots that lay beyond her home, she saw, along the rounded tree tops and the chimneyed roofs that made for her the western sky line, that the blanket of cloud was slowly rolling back upon itself, until at last it revealed a long, thin strip of open sky, clear and blue as some remembered stretch of summer sea. In the middle of this, far over on the west side of the town, the low square tower, built like an Italian belvedere on the Ursuline Sisters’ Convent, was silhouetted, and below and all around, the masses of foliage became vivid green in the new light that fell upon them.
As all the world about shrank in the shades of the coming night, the clouds deepened to a purple, and in the slow and silent changes that went constantly forward, their edges above were softly tinged with ashes of roses, while below, the reflected green of the trees changed their drab to pink. Then there was traced for her a long, wavy thread of glistening silver, the billowed top of some white cloud floating deep in the illimitable distances behind that opening in the sky. And then suddenly, the sun sinking into this proscenium illumined its infinite and glorious vistas with a flood of golden light.
But it was all subconsciously that this woman followed the varying shades and tones of color in the sunset of grays and golds, and if by a strangely divided intelligence she noted the physical changes that were being wrought in the world outside her, her thoughts within surged in a great ocean, of feeling against the cold and desolate shore that now bounded life for her. Otherwise, as she stood there at the close of this fateful day, and saw the gold grow brighter and the pink deepen to crimson, she might easily have worked out a poetic analogy between that little sunset, with the convent tower to give it gloom, and her own life; she would have done so once, and found a sweet exquisite sadness in it, but now—a grief at last had come to her too real and too tragic in its great reality for any such romanticism, a grief that sounded deeper than any tears.
Other griefs could be borne; they could be voiced; they could find comfort in the ministrations of sympathetic friends, in the consolations of religion; more than all in the healing balm that nature stores in the woods and fields. But here was a grief that was the more intense because she had so long dreaded it, known it even, though she had fought the recognition off, and never admitted it to herself before. She saw all that now, and it made clear so many little passages in her later life; passages that had been dark to her, and filled with vague troubles.
Here was a grief that was no new thing, but an old thing, that had been there all the time, like some fatal disease; she had felt its pains and it had put its restraints and its limitations and its renunciations upon her; now it had been correctly diagnosed at last, that was all; and it could not be changed, nor cured, nor alleviated even; but she must bear it alone and in silence, walking straight-lipped and dry-eyed the long way that stretched before.
In some such mode as this her thoughts had been rushing on ever since that moment downstairs in the afternoon when the whole truth had been at last revealed to her. She had thought it out along every line she could trace; she had analyzed and synthesized; she had viewed it from every possible standpoint; she had built up elaborate schemes of repair, of rehabilitation; she had planned a new life to be begun when the wreck of the old had been cleared away by forgiveness and new resolve; but in the end, it had all come to the same remorseless conviction—her faith had been destroyed, it lay dead at her feet; nothing could ever change that fact any more.
The colors were slowly dying out of the narrow strip of sky along the horizon and it had become opalescent and serene with evening. A new life seemed suddenly to awake in the world below her. A robin, that should have been in bed, went springing across the yard, swelling its red breast, and Emily was vaguely conscious of wondering if it were the one she had heard that afternoon singing in the rain. Something moved her to raise the window, something in the new and vital pulse that thrilled the world.
With the inrushing air came the sickening odor of the late-flowering locust tree, and there were borne to her as well the gentle sounds of evening, the endless trilling of insects in the wet grass; the lowing of a cow; by and by the belated crow of some rooster. The world was alive and awake; it seemed to be stretching itself after its long prostration in the rain, and now it enjoyed this breath of keen air before it went to sleep, impatient for the hopeful morning when it might take up once more its glad ambitious life. But for her—so Emily’s thoughts ran—there was no hope and no to-morrow.
The sun had trailed the last of his splendors across that narrow opening in the sky. The opalescence swam into a new sea of silver, then suddenly a bar of yellow broke it, there was a rush of violet, then purple shadows dissolved the convent tower and the sky closed, cold and dark and still. And there came into Emily’s mind the lines:
“Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain.
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight, Never glad confident morning again!”
She closed her window and turned wearily away. She had her duties, her little duties; John Ethan was calling, and the supper was to be laid; life somehow after all must be lived.
She was going down the stairs, when suddenly from the little habits of existence that persist sometimes ludicrously, sometimes irritatingly, sometimes comfortingly, even in the most tragic moments of life, she thought of the evening papers lying at that moment damp and limp against the front door. The primaries—she stopped and steadied herself by the baluster—what had been the result of the primaries? She shook her head impatiently for thinking of them in that moment. What were primaries to her now? And yet—would he win?
She went on down the stairs, she found the papers, and now when the truth could no longer be hidden, or distorted to any one’s advantage, they printed the truth at last—none could tell the result at that hour; it was the hardest political battle ever waged in Polk County, and on it hung the political future of Jerome B. Garwood.
Something of the old excitement came back to her for a moment. He was there in the thick of it, fighting hard; he was desperate; he had risked all again for that political future—she stopped herself with a gasp—if, indeed, his future alone were all that was involved! To her it was his past that was involved; his past that meant more than all to her now. He had, indeed, risked all upon this battle, and all had been lost before the battle was begun!
She ate her lonely supper, she put her babies to bed, she prolonged all her evening duties that they might fill up her thoughts and the slow hours. Each sound, each foot-fall on the sidewalk startled her, and yet no one came. The evening passed. At last she went to bed, but all the noises of the night alarmed her, and in the darkness the burden of her thoughts became insupportable.
At last she got up and went to the window that gave a view of Sangamon Avenue and stood there watching and listening. She went back to bed, but sleep was far from her that night and time and time again she rose and went to her window. Finally, she wrapped herself in a shawl and huddled on the floor at the low sill, and still watched and listened. The night went by, hour after hour. Now and then she heard the baby sighing in his sleep—the poor little baby—and she straightened up, a dim, rigid, attentive figure there in the darkness. Once when the elder child awoke, sleepily calling for a drink, she went to him, but she could not stay; she came back again and resumed her lonely vigil.
And still the hours went by. The low night brooded over the slumbering town. Far down that black and silent street, its shapes distorted and unfamiliar in the shadows, she knew that his fate had been decided. The early hours of the morning brought their chill, and she shrugged herself more closely in her shawl, clutched it more tightly to her breast. And there in the window, alone, she watched and waited while the night grew old and waned.