“You sha'n't goo out wi' nothing on your stomach,” said the servant, who had been watching and waiting to see what he would do. Ezra, to satisfy her, poured out and drank a cup of coffee, and then walked out into the street, bending his steps in the direction of Rachel's cottage. Twice on the way he paused and half drew from his waistcoat-pocket the yellow old note which had so long lingered on its way to him, but each time he returned it without looking at it, and walked on again.
He stood for a moment at the wicket-gate, and then opening it passed through, suffering it to fall with a clatter behind him. His hand trembled strangely as he lifted it to the door, and he knocked with a tremulous loudness. When he had waited for a time he heard Rachel's footsteps tapping on the oil-cloth of the passage which divided her toy sitting-room from her bandbox of a parlor. His gray face went a shade grayer, and he cleared his throat nervously, with the tips of his thin fingers at his month. He heard the rattling of the door-chain, but it seemed rather as if it were being put up than taken down, and this suspicion was confirmed when it was opened with a little jar and stopped short at the confines of the chain. Rachel's face looked round the edge of the door. He had time to speak but a single word—“Rachel!”
The door was vigorously slammed in his face, and he heard the emphatic tapping of footsteps as she retired. He stood for a minute irresolute, and then, quitting the porch, walked round the thread of gravelled foot-path which led to the back of the cottage. He had but rounded the corner of the building when the back door closed with a clang, and he heard the bolts shot. Next, while he still stood irresolute, he saw Rachel approach a window and vigorously apply herself to the blind cord. In the mere instant which intervened between this and the descent of the blind she looked at him with a profound and passionate scorn. The old man sighed, and nodding his head up and down retraced his steps, but lingering in the pathway in the little garden, and surveying the house wistfully, he was again aware of Rachel, who faced him once more with an unchanging countenance. This time she appeared at the parlor window, and a second time the blind came down between him and her gaze of uncompromising scorn.
“Eh, dear!” he said, tremblingly, as he turned away. “Her's got reason to think it, poor thing. It's hard to find out the ways o' Providence. If it warn't for good it couldn't ha' happened, but it's a heavy burden all the same.”
CHAPTER XIII.
Ezra walked home and sat there alone until evening. His house-keeper routed him from his armchair for dinner and tea, and at each meal he made a feeble pretence of eating and drinking, and, having been scolded for his poor appetite, went back to his old place. He sat there till the room was dark, scarcely moving, but wearing no very noticeable sign of pain or trouble. The story was so old, and the misfortune it related was so long past mending! He had been gray himself these many years, and the things which surrounded him and touched him had long since shared all his own want of color.
There was no relighting these old ashes. And yet, in defiance of that avowed impossibility, they seemed now and again to glow. They warmed him and lighted him back to a perception of lost odor and dead color. They stung him into some remembrance of the pain of years ago. And then, again, they were altogether cold and lifeless.
He said vaguely in a half whisper that it was a pity; and the phrase rose to his lips a hundred times—oftener than not an utterance purely mechanical, and expressing neither regret for Rachel nor for himself, nor sorrow for their division. When he was not thinking of her or of himself, he murmured that this was how it had come to pass, and did not seem to care or feel at all.
When the gloom was deepening in Ezra's ill-lighted chamber, though the light of the summer evening still lingered outside, the house-keeper came in and drew the blinds, and left behind her a single candle, which left the room as dusky as before. Shortly after this Reuben came in, and Ezra, nodding, signed him to a chair. The young man took a seat in silence.