The house of the Widow Bemis was by this time reached, and that estimable lady, who in the summer furnished accommodations to a boarder whenever that rare blessing was to be secured in Kempton, readily undertook the charge of Mr. Farnsworth and his horse for the night. The latter was given into the care of her daughter, for the frequent absences of the men had accustomed the damsels of Kempton to those labors which in inland villages are more frequently left to their brothers; and Farnsworth strolled off toward the wharves, leaving the widow Bemis and Cap’n Hersey in an agony of curiosity in regard to himself and his errand.
Whatever may have been Farnsworth’s feelings at the discovery that the daughter of the dead sexton and the woman of whom he had asked tidings of her were identical,—and they must have been both deep and strong—he had given no outward sign. But now the settling of his brows, and the disquiet apparent in his eyes betrayed his inward conflict. He strolled out upon one of the rotting wharves about which the tide lapped in mournful iteration, folded his arms upon a breast-high post, and stood gazing seaward.
The retrospect which occupied his mind was scarcely more cheerful than the gray scene which spread before his eyes. How awful are the corpses of dead sins which memory casts up, as the sea its victims! The betrayal of a woman is a ghastly thing when one looks back upon it stripped of the garlands and enchantments of passion and temptation; and to Farnsworth, with the image fresh in his rememberance of that faded, earth-stained woman digging a grave upon the bleak hillside, the fault of his youth seemed an incredible dream which only stubborn and stinging memory converted into a possibility. A retrospect is apt to be essentially a plea for self against conscience; but in his gloomy revery Farnsworth found scant excuse for the wreck he had made of the life of Delia Grimwet. He had gone away, married, and lived honored and prosperous. He would have forgotten, had not some nobility of his nature prevented. With the stubbornness of his race, he had fought long and determinedly against his conscience, but he had been forced to yield at last. The death of his wife, to whom he had been tenderly attached, had at once left him free to make such reparation as might still be possible, and had softened him as only sharp sorrow can. He had come to Kempton with the determination of finding Delia, and of doing whatever could be done, at whatever cost to himself.
He had been unprepared, however, for the woman he found. He had left a fresh, beautiful young girl; ten years had transformed her into a repulsive old woman. He had no means of adequately measuring the force of the storms of scorn and poverty and sorrow which had beaten upon Delia Grimwet in the years that had made of him the cultured, delicately nurtured man he was. What man ever appreciated the woe of the woman he betrays? Indeed, what measure has a man of the sorrow of any woman? Farnsworth had painfully to adjust himself to a condition of affairs for which he should have been prepared, yet which took him absolutely by surprise.
He lingered upon the bleak wharf, unconsciously the object of much mildly speculative curiosity, until the twilight began to fall. Then with a shiver, no less of mind than of body, he shook off his painful abstraction, and turned his steps toward the path, once well known, which led to the house of Delia Grimwet. It seemed to him, as he paused a brief instant with his hand upon the old knocker, as if nothing here had changed in ten years. The sunlight would have shown him traces of decay, but in the gathering dusk the house seemed a pallid phantom from the past, unchanged but lifeless.
But his knock at once destroyed all illusions, since it summoned the woman who belonged not at all to that past which he remembered, but to the pitiful and too tangible present. She held her guttering candle up without a word, and, having identified him, made him, without speaking, a signal to enter.
When Farnsworth had left her in the afternoon, Delia crouched in the bottom of the grave she was digging, her first feeling being an unreasoning desire for concealment. She thought she should remain passive if the sides of the pit collapsed and buried her. In the old days before her boy was born she had been night after night out on the old wharves, praying for courage to drown herself. After the child came, her feelings changed, and she longed only to escape and to take her son away from the scorn and the sordid life which surrounded them. Gradually she had become hardened; hers was one of those common natures to which custom and pain are opiates, mercifully dulling all sensibilities. To-day the appearance of her betrayer had revivified all the old impressions, and for a moment seemed to transport her to the early days when her anguish was new. The keenest pangs of sorrow stabbed her afresh, and she lived again the bitter moments of her sin and shame. Her instinct was to flee from the man whose presence meant to her only pain.
But habit is strong, and presently the fading light reminded the sexton that her work was still unfinished, and that Widow Pettigrove, who was past all earthly tribulation, must have her last bed prepared, whatever the woe of the living woman who worked at it with trembling hands and a sensation as if a demon had clutched her by the throat. Yet work was not unmerciful; it brought some relief, since it served to dilute the thought which rushed dizzyingly to her brain, and by the time her toil was completed she was steadier. When she opened the door to Farnsworth she was not unlike her usual stolid self. She perceived at a glance that he had learned who she was, and she hoped in a blind, aching way, that he had not betrayed his presence to the neighbors, thus to re-awaken all the old stinging flight of bitter words.
Farnsworth followed Delia into the kitchen, without even those greetings which habit renders so involuntary that only in the most poignant moments are they disregarded. With their past between them it was not easy to break the silence. Farnsworth seated himself, and the woman stood regarding him. There was in her attitude all the questioning, all the agony, of her years of suffering. Her wrongs and her sorrows gave her a dignity before which he shrank as he could not have quailed under the most withering reproaches. Whatever words he would have spoken—and no man can come deliberately to so important a crisis without formulating, even if unconsciously, the plea which his self-defence will make—were forgotten, or seemed miserably inadequate now. What were words to this woman, pallid and worn before her time with privation, anguish, and unwomanly toil? The contrast between his rich and careful dress and her coarse garb, between his white hands and her knotted fingers, between his high-bred, pale face and her cowed, weather-beaten countenance, was too violent not to be apparent to them both,—as if they were in some strange way merely spectators looking dispassionately at this wretched meeting of those who had once been passionate lovers.