A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

Without another word, Gregory tightened his rein and galloped on, out through the wood’s edge and so down to the plain. He did not see, in the high excitement of the moment, the figure of a man lurking stealthily among the trees at no great distance from where Keith stood. When the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away, this figure stepped softly out from its shelter and passed along the bridle-path, peering inquisitively in the face of Keith as he still stood where Gregory had left him. But neither did Keith observe him, nor care who he was, and so he went on his way toward Fraternia. He looked back once or twice. His last look showed him that Keith had gathered himself together and was walking slowly away, in the direction from which he had come.

Keith walked blindly on, not knowing why he went, nor where he went, like a man who has suffered a heavy blow upon his brain, and moves only automatically without thought or will. On the outskirts of the village, near the railroad, he passed a barn, rickety and disused, but there was old hay in a heap on the floor of it, it offered shelter, and shelter without the contact with others from which he shrunk as if he were in disgrace, and fleeing for his life. Accordingly Keith went into this place, drawing the broken door together as far as he could move it on its rusty hinges, threw himself on the heap of hay, and slept until five o’clock in the morning. The one passenger train of the day passing through Spalding eastward was due at five o’clock. Keith was wakened by the long whistle announcing its approach, and came dizzily out into the chill and wet of a miserable morning.

The train slowed down as it neared the place where he stood. He swung himself upon it with the brief but tense nervous energy of great exhaustion, sank into a vacant seat in the foul, unventilated car, and was carried on, whither he did not know or care.

Anna, coming back from the walk to Eagle Rock, had gone to her own house alone. Here she spent the earlier hours of the evening in the deepest travail of soul she had ever known. The purity and unworldliness of all her life, both the life of her girlhood and that with Keith, had served to keep far from her familiarity with possibilities of moral danger. She was as innocent of certain kinds of evil as a child, and the thought that a temptation to a guilty love could assault her would, until this day, have appeared to her incredible. And now, in the fierce struggle of this passion, the only one she had ever known, she knew herself not only capable of sin, but caught at last in its power.

Not that for a moment she dreamed of any compromise of outward fidelity; such a thought she rejected with horror as inconceivable either to herself or to Gregory, whom she firmly believed to be far stronger than she. But the flaw in faithfulness had come already, beyond recall, beyond repair. Her whole soul moved toward this man, who had so long secretly dominated her inner life, with a mighty and overwhelming tide.

Her relation to Keith had been that of gentlest consideration, kindliness, and affection. More it had never been; and to-night it seemed as powerless to stay the flood of passion as a wall of sand built on the shore of an infinite sea by the hands of a child.

So Anna thought, so she felt. She went to the door of her cabin with this thought mastering her, driven by restlessness, and longing to feel the coolness of the night air on her face. For a moment she stood in her open door, and saw mechanically that the moonlight was shed abroad in the valley; she heard the voices of the men across the river singing in a strong, sweet chorus.

Then, suddenly, as if the words had been spoken in her ear, the thought came to her, “But Keith needs me; he needs me now!”

What was it? She did not know. She never understood. The sense was strong upon her that Keith was near her; that he was in some danger, and needed her.

Without pause to consider what she did, Anna flew down the river path and reached the mill breathless. The pond lay in the moonlight, motionless. The air did not stir. The mill was still and dark and deserted. The woods were dim with their night mystery. She looked down the valley, and up, and across the river, and everywhere was perfect peace, save in her own heart. Then in the silence she heard a step approaching from the direction of the woods below. She drew back hastily into the protection of the mill porch and waited for the steps to pass. Whoever it was paused for a little time above the mill, and Anna’s heart beat hard with a sense of dread and danger. Finally she heard the steps pass on, and when she returned to the road she recognized the unmistakable figure of the man now moving on in the unshadowed moonlight to the bridge above. It was Oliver Ingraham.