CHAPTER LXIX.
THE SOUL'S DANGER.
HOW, and by what way, that poor young creature came out on the verge of the Black Lake she could not have told. When she came down those balcony steps she had left the world behind her. Filled with an insane idea of self-martyrdom, she went onward and onward as rudderless boats reel through a storm.
Now she stood among the rushes—clouds over her head, a great sea of inky waters weltering away from her feet—gloom and blackness everywhere. The old lake house flung down uncouth shadows on one hand, a gnarled oak pushed its gaunt limbs far over the waters on the other. The rushes around her swayed and moaned in the wind like living things in pain.
Was it this weird picture that brought Ruth to a sense of her own condition? Did it seem to her as if she had already accomplished her purpose, and was entering upon its punishment? Who can answer for the impulses of a soul in its passions of distress? No two events are alike in all the tumultuous actions of life. When the destinies of a human being can be turned by a chance thought, a careless word, even a sunbeam, more or less, what intellect can fathom the exact thing that sways it for good or evil? One might have thought that the gloom of this picture would intensify the dark resolve that had urged that young creature on to death. Instead of that, it came upon her with a great shock, and she stood there among the rushes appalled.
Was it by that dark way she could hope to find her father?
As she asked this question an awful fear came upon her. She walked slowly backward, with her eyes fixed upon the water, breathing heavier and heavier, as the rushes swayed to their place between her and them. Thus she drew away from the awful danger to the threshold of the lake house. There she sat down.
What was this thing she had promised to do? A great crime which would shut her out from her father's presence forever and ever, which would make it impossible to meet her young husband through all eternity. She was willing to die for him—the agony was nothing. Had she not suffered more than that over and over again? But to give him up here and beyond those black waters was more than she could force upon her soul.
Beyond all this, the delicate organism of her being shrunk from that which might come to her body after death. She saw, as if it were a real presence, herself sinking, sinking down into the blackness of those waters, her limbs, so full of life now, limp and dead, tangled in the coarse grasses, or seized upon by some undercurrent, and dragged down into the depths of the earth. Worse still, coarse men might, with mistaken kindness, search the waters, and lift her from them in the very presence of her husband; who would see the face he had kissed swollen, the sodden lengths of her hair trailing the—the—