Presently the great vehicle slowed up, panting and sizzling as if winded in the race. He sprang out before it had ceased to move and rushed up the stairs, patrolling the various apartments, the ladies’ waiting room, the refreshment room—he remembered that she could have had no dinner—the general ante-room, with its crowd of the traveling public. He was a notable figure, with his splendid appearance, his fur-lined overcoat, his frowning, intent brow, his long, swift stride.
All in vain—she was not there. The clamor of the train that was making ready for departure struck his absorbed attention. The place was full of the odor of the bituminous smoke from the locomotive; he heard the panting of the steam exhaust.
Floyd-Rosney rushed down the stairs and into the great shed which seemed, with its high vaulted roof, clouded with smoke dull and dim, despite the glare here and there of electric lights. He was stopped in the crowd at the gate. He had no ticket—money could not buy it here. He explained hastily that he wished to see a friend off. The regulations were stringent, the functionary obdurate; the crowd streaming through the gate disposed to stare, and a burly policeman, lounging about, regarded the insistent swell with an inimical glare. For there are those dressed like swells that are far from that puffed-up estate.
The suggestion calmed Floyd-Rosney for the nonce. It needed but this, he felt, to complete his folly—to involve himself in a futile fracas with a gateman and a cop. Moreover, he had no justification in fancying that Paula was likely to take a train—in fact, and he smiled grimly, she would not have the cash to buy a ticket. The whole theory that she might quit the city was a baseless fabrication of his fears, of the disorder of his ideas induced by the vexatious and unexpected contretemps. Doubtless, by this time she had returned from the stroll or the call, or whatever device she had adopted to quiet her spirit and divert her mind, he argued—he himself had found refreshment in a brisk walk in the night air—and was now sitting before the fire at home, awaiting his coming, possibly willing to discuss the matter in a more amicable frame of mind.
He was about to turn aside when suddenly down the line of rails within the shed and between the train standing still and the one beginning to move, the metallic clangor of its bell insistently jarring the air, he saw the figure of Paula, visible in the glare of the headlight of the locomotive beside her. Every detail was as distinct, as illuminated as in the portrayal of a magic lantern—her taupe gown, her hat with a plume of the same shade, her face flushed, laughing and eager. A man was assisting her to mount the platform of the coach and in him Floyd-Rosney was sure he recognized Randal Ducie, whose arrival in the city he had noted in the evening paper. The whole maneuver of boarding the train,—the placing of the stool by the porter, Paula’s failure to reach from it to the step of the car, the swift muscular effort by which Ducie seized her, swung her to the platform, and then sprang upon it himself,—was all as plain to the frenzied man watching the vanishing train from between the palings of the gate as if the scene had been enacted within ten feet of him.
CHAPTER XX
Paula reached her destination early the next morning. She had not slept during the night and as soon as the light began to dawn she raised the blind at her window and lay in her berth looking out drearily at the face of the country, growing constantly more familiar, but yet dimly descried and colorless as a scene in sepia, with the lagging night still clinging to the earth. Belts of white vapor lay in every depression; the forests along the horizon made a dark circumference for the whole; the stars were wan and sad of aspect and faded from the sky, one by one, as the eye dwelt upon them. The characteristic features of the swamp region had vanished. In many places the land was deeply gullied, showing as the day waxed a richly tinted red clay that made the somber landscape glow. Everywhere were the hedges of the evergreen Cherokee rose, defining the borders of fields, often untrimmed and encroaching in a great green billow on spaces unmeet for a mere boundary mark. The trees were huge; gigantic oaks and the spreading black-gum; and she was ready, her hat on, her wrap and furs adjusted, looking out eagerly at these dense bosky growths when the red wintry sun began to cast long shafts of quiet dull sheen adown their aisles, showing the white rime on the rough bark of the boughs, or among the russet leaves, still persistently clinging. More than once the conductor came in to consult her as to the precise point of stoppage, and, when a long warning whistle set the echoes astir in the quiet matutinal atmosphere and the train began to slow down, she was alertly on her feet.
“You are sure of the place, ma’am?” said the conductor, helping her descend the step; he was new to the road, and there seemed to him nothing here but woods.
She reassured him as she lightly ran down the steep incline, and then she stood for a moment, mechanically watching the train, epitome of the world, sweeping away and leaving her here, the dense forest before her, the smoke flaunting backward, the sun emblazoning its convolutions, the wondering faces of the passengers at the windows.
She remembered the time when this wonder would have nettled her. She had wanted a station platform built here, but her uncle had utilitarian theories, and, somehow, “never got round to it,” as he was wont to phrase it. So seldom, indeed, they boarded the train, so seldom it brought a visitor, that it seemed to him the least and last needed appurtenance of the plantation. She wondered if the stoppage had been not noted at the house. The woods were silent, as with mystery, as she took her way through “the grove.” The frost lay white on the grass, and there was even a glint of ice in the water lurking in the ruts of a wagon wheel in the road. She walked on these frozen edges after a fashion learned long ago to keep her feet dainty when not so expensively shod as now. Suddenly she heard the deep baying of a hound.