A Noble Woman

by Ann S. Stephens

CHAPTER LXVII.

UTTER LONELINESS.

When Elizabeth Mellen quitted the graveyard, she was for the moment insane. Mellen had left her alone with the dead and the man she had so hated. He had forsaken her there in that cold, desolate night, regardless that she had once been his wife, scorning to remember her even as a woman. This thought stung her proud soul through all its anguish. She would not return home; not a single hour would she rest under the roof which loomed up so gray and ghostly behind those weird trees. But where could she go? in all the headlands that spread away from the coast there was no shelter for her. Degraded, broken-hearted, abandoned to her fate, like a wild animal, she stood alone among the graves of those who had been happy enough to die.

This terrible blow, long as it had been dreaded, came upon the poor woman suddenly at last. At the bottom of her heart there had been all the while a desperate hope of escape. But it was over now. The worst had come, and that was almost annihilation. She looked up to the sky. The stars were all out. The soft gray clouds which had floated over them only a little while before were turning leaden and heavy, so heavy that the ocean was one mass of blackness, as if the mighty deep had veiled itself with mourning, while the throes of a coming tempest heaved its inner depths.

The man North had left her at last—she was utterly alone.

Never in this world had a human being been cast forth to such utter desolation. She looked down on the torn earth at her feet, and her poor heart ached to lie down with that other woman who had found her rest so early, and was at peace. She thought of her with strange envy, remembering that the ocean had cast her forth when it moaned and heaved as she could hear it now,—the grand, beneficent ocean, that could give death to a poor soul pining for it as she did. She bent her head and listened to the far-off voice which held her with a sort of fascination.

"I will go," she said, "I will go. It calls me—with ten thousand voices it calls me."

She started from the tombstone against which she had leaned, and swiftly treading a passage through the graves, forced her way out by the broken pickets. That moment Mellen stood in the cedar grove and saw her pass. Had he come forth all might have been well, but fierce pride rushed in and checked the noble impulse that had brought him back so far. She swept swiftly by him and was lost in the fog. Some strong impulse of love broke up through the insane fascination which drove her toward the ocean, and in spite of herself she drifted homewards. Once a break in the clouds sent down wild gleams of light, throwing up black vistas of gloom through every break in the woods, and revealing dense, gray masses of vapor, frowning over the waters. Then came darkness again, and she wandered on.

Without knowing how, Elizabeth found herself on the lawn before her old home. The odor of dead leaves and late autumn blossoms rose up from the soil, and enveloped her with sickening remembrances. All at once the woman recognised the place. That pile with its gables and towers had been her home only a few short hours before. Why had she turned that way? What mocking fiend had driven her back against her will? The thought maddened her, but she could not move. The passionate love in her heart anchored those weary feet. She flung up her arms towards a window through which a light shone dimly—the window of his room, and an agonising cry of farewell broke from her. It was his name that fled from her lips like a burning arrow, and reached her husband in the gloomy stillness of his chamber.

The window opened. She tore her feet from the earth and fled. Her husband, of all others, should not know that she was there, prowling about the home from which he had driven her. That cry of agony coming from her lips frightened back her pride.