CHAPTER XXXV
Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung,
And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day
Went glooming down in wet and weariness;
But under her black brows a swarthy one
Laugh’d shrilly, crying: “Praise the patient saints,
Our one white day of Innocence hath past,
Though somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it.”
—Tennyson.
At nine o’clock that evening Barnabas Rosenblatt, working around the mill stables, was startled at the sudden appearance of Gregory, who passed him without speaking, as he went hurriedly into the stall and brought out his horse. The day had been followed by a night of brilliant moonlight, and Barnabas saw, as distinctly as if it had been day, that his face, usually firm and composed, was drawn and haggard to a degree. He started to speak to him, but an imperious gesture of Gregory silenced him. Without a word Barnabas therefore assisted him in saddling the horse, and then stood perplexed as he watched him gallop away down the valley in the moonlight.
Straight on through a narrow bridle-path which led by a short cut through the stretch of oak wood to the little hamlet of Spalding, Gregory galloped. He had reached the outskirts of the woods, and was in sight of the level meadows and the cluster of lights of the village beyond, when he suddenly perceived the figure of a man on foot approaching him from the direction of Spalding. A few steps more, and Gregory saw, with surprise and strange perturbation, that it was Keith Burgess. He reined up his horse and stood motionless, until Keith had reached him, and called out a greeting as he stood in the path, looking a pigmy beside the Titanic proportions of the horse and rider. The moonlight showed Keith more thin and wan than ever. He had returned to Fraternia once before this spring, in March, but, after a week, had been glad to go back to Baltimore, with some rather vague commission. His return at this time was wholly unexpected, even by Anna.
Keith had long since come to stand to Gregory for something like a concrete embodiment of his many disappointments and vexations, by reason of his lukewarm participation in his own purposes, his ineffective labours, and his continual draft upon Anna’s sympathies. As Gregory looked down upon him, thrown at this moment so unexpectedly in his path, a singular hardness toward the man came upon him, for he was hard beset by passion; and while he meant to have no mercy upon himself, he was not in the mood to have mercy upon another man, least of all, perhaps, upon Keith.
“You are going back to Fraternia?” he asked coldly, his tone striking Keith with chill surprise. The latter assented as a matter of course.
There was a moment of silence; Keith felt something sinister in the nature of it.
“Why should you go back there?” Gregory asked now, with the same careless coldness; “you have no heart in Fraternia or its purposes.”
Keith was stirred, and answered pointedly:—
“I have at least a wife in Fraternia, Mr. Gregory.”
Gregory looked at him a moment with a measuring glance, noting his wasted and feeble appearance.
“I suppose you do need nursing,” he said slowly.
Keith Burgess turned ashy pale. Was this wanton injury? Did Gregory wish to insult him? What did it mean? Gregory did not know himself. He knew only that, in the agony of that night, for he had fully resolved himself to see Anna no more, the sight of Keith Burgess worked like madness in his brain.
“Mrs. Burgess,” he said now, with the deliberation of strongly suppressed excitement, “is more highly endowed for great issues than any person I have ever known. It is almost a pity that she should not have freedom to use her powers in the greater activities to which she is fitted.”
Each sentence, cruel with all the cruelty which the climax of pride and passion could inspire, pierced the heart of Keith like a shaft barbed with steel. He stepped backward and leaned against a tree, breathing hard. The occult, mysterious quality of the moment’s experience to him was that he saw himself, distinctly and as if by an inexorable necessity, turning away from Fraternia, and going back by the way which he had come.
Without another word, Gregory tightened his rein and galloped on, out through the wood’s edge and so down to the plain. He did not see, in the high excitement of the moment, the figure of a man lurking stealthily among the trees at no great distance from where Keith stood. When the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away, this figure stepped softly out from its shelter and passed along the bridle-path, peering inquisitively in the face of Keith as he still stood where Gregory had left him. But neither did Keith observe him, nor care who he was, and so he went on his way toward Fraternia. He looked back once or twice. His last look showed him that Keith had gathered himself together and was walking slowly away, in the direction from which he had come.
Keith walked blindly on, not knowing why he went, nor where he went, like a man who has suffered a heavy blow upon his brain, and moves only automatically without thought or will. On the outskirts of the village, near the railroad, he passed a barn, rickety and disused, but there was old hay in a heap on the floor of it, it offered shelter, and shelter without the contact with others from which he shrunk as if he were in disgrace, and fleeing for his life. Accordingly Keith went into this place, drawing the broken door together as far as he could move it on its rusty hinges, threw himself on the heap of hay, and slept until five o’clock in the morning. The one passenger train of the day passing through Spalding eastward was due at five o’clock. Keith was wakened by the long whistle announcing its approach, and came dizzily out into the chill and wet of a miserable morning.
The train slowed down as it neared the place where he stood. He swung himself upon it with the brief but tense nervous energy of great exhaustion, sank into a vacant seat in the foul, unventilated car, and was carried on, whither he did not know or care.
Anna, coming back from the walk to Eagle Rock, had gone to her own house alone. Here she spent the earlier hours of the evening in the deepest travail of soul she had ever known. The purity and unworldliness of all her life, both the life of her girlhood and that with Keith, had served to keep far from her familiarity with possibilities of moral danger. She was as innocent of certain kinds of evil as a child, and the thought that a temptation to a guilty love could assault her would, until this day, have appeared to her incredible. And now, in the fierce struggle of this passion, the only one she had ever known, she knew herself not only capable of sin, but caught at last in its power.
Not that for a moment she dreamed of any compromise of outward fidelity; such a thought she rejected with horror as inconceivable either to herself or to Gregory, whom she firmly believed to be far stronger than she. But the flaw in faithfulness had come already, beyond recall, beyond repair. Her whole soul moved toward this man, who had so long secretly dominated her inner life, with a mighty and overwhelming tide.
Her relation to Keith had been that of gentlest consideration, kindliness, and affection. More it had never been; and to-night it seemed as powerless to stay the flood of passion as a wall of sand built on the shore of an infinite sea by the hands of a child.
So Anna thought, so she felt. She went to the door of her cabin with this thought mastering her, driven by restlessness, and longing to feel the coolness of the night air on her face. For a moment she stood in her open door, and saw mechanically that the moonlight was shed abroad in the valley; she heard the voices of the men across the river singing in a strong, sweet chorus.
Then, suddenly, as if the words had been spoken in her ear, the thought came to her, “But Keith needs me; he needs me now!”
What was it? She did not know. She never understood. The sense was strong upon her that Keith was near her; that he was in some danger, and needed her.
Without pause to consider what she did, Anna flew down the river path and reached the mill breathless. The pond lay in the moonlight, motionless. The air did not stir. The mill was still and dark and deserted. The woods were dim with their night mystery. She looked down the valley, and up, and across the river, and everywhere was perfect peace, save in her own heart. Then in the silence she heard a step approaching from the direction of the woods below. She drew back hastily into the protection of the mill porch and waited for the steps to pass. Whoever it was paused for a little time above the mill, and Anna’s heart beat hard with a sense of dread and danger. Finally she heard the steps pass on, and when she returned to the road she recognized the unmistakable figure of the man now moving on in the unshadowed moonlight to the bridge above. It was Oliver Ingraham.
Slowly Anna returned to her own cottage, not daring to do otherwise, a heavy oppression on her heart.
Early in the morning, which was cold and rainy, Oliver was at her door, and she answered his summons herself, full of a vague, trembling anxiety. He scanned her face narrowly; it was careworn and hollow-eyed, for she had slept not at all.
In silence he handed her a letter, broken at the edges, and soiled with long carrying about. She glanced at the address. It was Keith’s, written by herself perhaps a month before; not a recent letter. She looked at Oliver in speechless perplexity.
“I found that lying on the ground down near Spalding last night,” he said, still eying her craftily, and with that hurried off, giving her not another word.
Anna went in, closed the door, and drew out the letter. It was unimportant, insignificant, simply an ordinary letter of wifely affection and solicitude, but one which had evidently been much read, being worn on the folds. Who could have carried it save Keith himself? Had he, then, been really near her the night before? Was he really coming?
Anna knew already that it was for this she longed supremely.
Noon brought to Everett a special messenger with a letter from Gregory, who brought with him also the roan horse ridden the night before to the county town, C——, and evidently ridden fiercely. At C—— was the bank where Gregory transacted all his business. This letter stated, first of all, that he had suddenly reached the conclusion that it was important and imperative that he should go at once to England in the interests of the colony. He should not return to Fraternia before sailing. He wished to empower Everett to act in his place during his absence, which would not be for more than three months.
Various items of business were enumerated, and the letter closed with this remarkable statement: “The funds furnished by Mr. Ingraham of Burlington have been returned to him with the exception of the five thousand dollars already used, which I shall restore at my earliest opportunity. This removes the obligation from us of counting Mr. Oliver Ingraham as one of our number, and I beg that you will signify to him my conviction that his continued presence in Fraternia is impossible. Do not allow him to stay a day if you can help yourself, and keep him under your eye while he remains.”