CHAPTER XIII
WHEN Black Pawl saw the locket, his hands fell and hung limply at his sides. He stared at the little golden thing; and his eyes blurred, and he brushed his knuckles across them, and stared again.
Under his gaze, bent thus upon her throat, the girl crimsoned; she did not understand, but she saw that a change had come in the man. She was breathless, wondering and bewildered. She put up her hands to gather her waist together; and Black Pawl caught her wrists gently, and held them aside; and then he fumbled the locket in his thick fingers, and bent near her, so that his mop of iron-gray hair brushed her face. She looked down and saw that he was trying to open the locket with a blunted thumb-nail.
When the locket was open, he cried out, hoarsely. For it held, on the one side a daguerreotype of a little boy; and on the other, an old and faded photograph of a woman. A long time he gazed at it; then he closed it and lifting his eyes, looked into Ruth Lytton’s eyes as he did so. She saw the black tragedy that was eating him, and touched his arm pityingly. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s all right, truly.” She knew the man was broken with shame, even though she did not understand.
He was studying her with glazing eyes. His daughter! She was his daughter—his daughter, and mirror of his love of the years agone.
He tottered, as though under a succession of blows. He swayed where he stood; and abruptly he lifted his hands and cried out, in the agony of this new knowledge, and in a passionate abasement, to the God he had forgotten.
Silent, then, he seemed to listen for an answer. And when no answer came, the man’s head drooped, and he turned stumblingly, and opened the door of Ruth’s cabin, and went out. He dropped into a chair by the table in the cabin. His head fell forward on his crossed arms.
The girl was blankly bewildered by what had passed. There was no fear in Ruth Lytton; there had never been fear in her. There was infinite charity in her for Black Pawl’s sins. And—she knew the man was not himself, was half sick, was broken.
The matter of the locket meant nothing to her. She supposed that sight of it had evoked some ancient memory, but she had no guess as to what that memory might be. Standing alone in her cabin,—he had closed the door behind him,—she was trembling at the thought, not of her own peril, but of the terrible remorse and abasement in Black Pawl’s cry to God. She had never seen a man thus completely broken and helpless before the Unseen; and there was a majesty about the sight that gripped her.
Nevertheless, after a moment, she felt a quite human anxiety. She had seen the full depths of Black Pawl’s self-contempt; she was suddenly afraid that the man would harm himself. And when she thought of the chance of this, she forgot everything else in her haste to find him, and comfort him, and tell him all was well.