Racing upstairs, Christian changed rapidly into morning clothes, for he expected Callander at any moment, and when he came down again he noticed that the door into the garden was open. On a sudden impulse he went out, to find his mother standing under the old cedar, looking up at its swaying canopy.
The gale was at its height, now. The wind ran and roared through the wood like a horde of yelling satyrs, and beat at the old house as if it would rive the stones asunder. The cedar groaned as it wrestled in the arms of its mighty antagonist, straightening its old limbs and lifting its tossed head, only to be bowed to the earth anew. Sometimes, as it bent, Mrs. Lyndesay was lost to sight beneath the straining boughs, and Christian fought his way out to her, and laid a hand on her sleeve.
“You’d better come in!” he shouted, his mouth close to her ear. “It isn’t safe out of doors—especially here. The wind’s taking the trees all over the garden, and the old cedar’s rotten all through.”
She obeyed reluctantly, and as the full force of the wind met them round the house, she staggered and caught him by the arm, and he supported her across the lawn. It came to him, as he did so, that this was the first time in his life that she had turned to him for help: the first occasion since he had grown to manhood on which she had touched him of her own accord.
Once inside, she sank panting on the window seat, while he put his shoulder to the door and shut out the shrieking void.
“A Lyndesay’s Night!” she exclaimed, as he came back to her where she sat, her white face framed by the oak of the wall and the wild night without. “A Lyndesay’s Night! The tree is calling for one of us, Christian. Shall it be you or I?”
“Neither, I hope!” he answered as cheerfully as he could, lifting his coat from a peg near, and slipping it on. “Certainly not you. And for me, I am not ready to go yet. I want much more of life before I follow the Tree.”
“But I should be glad to go!” she broke out passionately. “I want nothing more with anybody. Judases—Judases—the rotten world reeks with them! I’ve only loved three people in the whole of my life, and each of them played me false. Oh, God! is there no end to it? Judases—Judases—every one!”
She wrung her hands together, rocking to and fro until her widow’s cap touched the leaded pane. The ice was broken at last, and the torrents of hidden anguish came racing into view, carrying all before them. Christian shrank a little, appalled by the force of her unwonted distress.
“All false!” she cried again. “That woman to-night—she lied when she said that I did not love her. I had grown fond of her. She understood me better than anybody; better than my own mother or my own children. There was something frank and brave about her that got at my heart, something that seemed mountains high above the mud of treachery. I believed in her, in spite of the secret marriage; and all the time she stayed with me for her own ends, not for my comfort—not because I cared for her, but merely to gain a man who did not trust her—and with cause! That was Nettie Stone. Let her go!”