She spoke calmly enough, but with a certain poignant stress which made every word fall like a weight. He did not urge her further. He held out his hand, into which she laid hers lifelessly.
“Good-bye,” he said. “As God sees me, Delia, I’ll do my best by the boy. I will write to you. If you change your decision,—but no matter now. I will write to you and to the minister.”
All other words of parting were brief and soon spoken. The boy showed no emotion at leaving his mother, as he had throughout exhibited no tenderness. He climbed noisily into the carriage, and the father and son, so strangely assorted, rode together up the hill, past the stark meeting-house, and so on into the world whose seething waves seldom troubled, even by such a ripple as the events just narrated, the dull calm of Kempton; and to John Farnsworth it was as if the woful burden of remorse which had so long vexed heart and conscience had taken bodily shape and rode by his side.
Delia had been calm until the two were gone,—so calm that her husband thought her still half dazed by the excitement and anguish of the previous night. She stood steadily at the window until the carriage disappeared behind the grave-covered hill. Then she threw herself grovelling upon the floor in the very ecstasy of woe. She did not shriek, strangling in her throat into inarticulate moans and gurglings the cries which rent their way from her inmost soul; but she beat her head upon the bare floor; she caught at the furniture like a wild beast, leaving the print of her strong teeth in the hard wood; she was convulsed with her agony, a speechless animal rage, a boundless, irrepressible anguish which could not be measured or expressed. She clutched her bosom with her savage hands, as if she would tear herself in pieces; she wounded and bruised herself with a fierceness so intense as to be almost delight.
In the midst of her wildest paroxysm there came a knocking at the door. She started up, her face positively illuminated.
“They have come back!” she murmured in ecstasy.
She rushed to the door and undid its fastenings with fingers tremulous from eager joy. A neighbor confronted her, staring in dismay and amazement at her strange and dishevelled appearance.
“What’s come to ye, Dele?” he demanded roughly, though not unkindly. “When ye goin’ to put the box in Widder Pettigrove’s grave?”
She confronted him for an instant with a wandering look in her eye, as though she had mercifully been driven mad. Then the tyranny of life and habit reasserted itself.
“I’ll come up now, Bill,” she said.