Had she opened her breast and shown him a heart of stone, she could not better have revealed her nature. It was to Jim as if the earth had yawned before his feet, showing rottenness beneath its flowers. That eye of ice, that hard mouth, those blasphemous words! Jim did not know, he never could remember, how he got himself from the house.
He fled by night from the pursuit that never was to be. Taking the New York train, he lay in his berth, thinking, dozing, thinking again, while the train sped through the darkness. He slept and dreamed of burning kisses; he woke to feel the swaying of the car, to hear the whistle scream, or, shutting out all other sounds, to strain his ears for noises close at hand—the rustling of the curtains or the soft footfall of the porter. He slept again, and from a nightmare in which a serpent coiled about him, he came to himself in a quiet station, where steam hissed steadily, where hurrying steps resounded, where trucks rumbled by, and voices were heard giving orders. He looked from his berth along the curtained aisle—what misery besides his own was hiding behind those hangings? Then he dozed again with the motion of the train, and saw Beth, far removed and wonderfully pure, looking down on him with horror; his dream changed and Mrs. Harmon stood at his side, leading a walking corpse. And then he started from sleep with a smothered shriek, and with his thoughts urged the train to go faster, faster away from Beth, from that temptress, from the friends he had betrayed and the mother whom he had robbed.
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
Judith Binds Herself
Judith was alone, waiting for Mather, and wrestling with the question which at the discovery of her father's body had rushed upon her. Was his death her fault?
Had she accepted Ellis, or had she recalled her refusal when her father begged her, the Colonel would now be living. She might have guessed the desperate resolve that he had taken. What would have been her duty, had she understood? Or what should she have done, had he appealed to her? And not understanding, not having foreseen, how much was her fault?
There was here a chance for speculation to drive a weaker woman wild. But Judith had not the nature to yield to such a danger. Essentially combative, naturally active, her habit was to put the past behind, accept the present, and look the future in the face. This instinct stood by her now, and even though her shuddering mind still dwelt upon the catastrophe, something within her called her to stand up, control herself, look forward. And one more mental trait, which was in some respects the great defect in her character—namely her almost masculine fashion of judging herself and others—here stood her in good stead, and served her by showing her father's action in the proper light.
Though she perceived that she had led him into this entanglement, she saw more. The Colonel had had not only his own but also his wife's fortune: where had the money gone? Strong as were Judith's grief and pity for him, abundantly as she acknowledged her part in his error, she could not fail to see how selfish had been his actions, how cowardly this desertion!