But very soon this access of intense alarm lessened. She partly ceased to fix her thought upon what she had done, recalling instead, why she had done it. She turned, giving two flurried looks to right and left, doubtless from a sense that the abhorred one might have breasted the same peril as herself—in his case far lighter, of course.
Her gaze swept the opposite pier. It gleamed drowsy and obscure, with the effect of some grave marine monster just risen from the muddy tides below it. Strangely, also, the lights at either side gave it the semblance of two malign blazing eyes. And in the glimmer thus made Claire saw Slocumb.
He had not taken the leap. At first amazement had wrought in him its brief yet telling effect. Then he had dashed to the end of the pier, momentarily furious at thus being balked. But in a second his fury had cooled. And something had cooled it, very new to him, though very forcible. This was pity. He might easily have cleared the interspace. But he forbore to do so. He thrust both hands into his pockets, and with lowered head moved away. In an instant more it was too late for him to have changed his novel resolve, even had he so wished.
By the time that Claire's look lighted upon the pier he was nowhere visible. He had disappeared from her sight forever, as also from her life. He had been a dread though brief experience—a glimpse given her into the melancholy darkness of human wrong. The shadows had seemed to take him back among themselves, where he rightly belonged. Perhaps the episode of his insolence wrought some sort of effect upon her future acts; it is certain that she never quite forgot the miserable dismay he had roused; and when the struggle for worldly success afterward spurred her with so keen a goad, some vague remembrance of to-night may have quickened her aspiring impulses and made what we call the socially best gain fresh worth in her eyes by contrast with such foul deeps as lie below it.
Once confident that Slocumb had not followed her, she managed, with unsteady pace, to reach the outer rail of the deck and lean against it while the boat traversed the river. She was trembling a good deal, and felt an extreme weakness as well. But a glow of triumph upbore her. She had escaped at last!
The ugly boat, as it sped along, seemed a sentient accomplice of her final good fortune. She had a fancy that its thick wooden rail dumbly throbbed beneath her grasp. Her posture was a half-cowering one; the spell of her poignant fears had not yet passed. Her head leaned itself peeringly from stooped shoulders in such a way that its slim neck took the sort of curve we see in a frightened deer's.
A somewhat late moon had recently risen, whose advent had altered the whole face of the heavens, flooding it with a spectral, yellowish light. But borne rapidly across the moon's blurred disk, on some high, fleet rush of air, scudded volumes of rolling and mutable vapor. They constantly soared above the great dusky city, at first in dense black masses, then thinning and lengthening as they came midway between zenith and horizon. While Claire watched these strange and volatile clouds, so incessant in their motion and so swift in their continual upward stream, they took, for her confused fancy, the semblance of pursuant phantom shapes. They formed themselves into visages and bodies; they stretched forth uncouth yet life-like arms; they clenched hands of misty gloom, and shook them far above her, with ghostly, imminent defiance. Her former transit across the river had been fraught with sweet, poetic mystery; her present voyage was one touched with a kind of allegoric terror.
But the boat soon found its second wharfage. Claire sped out through the two cabins in time to join the crowd of disembarking passengers. Once more back in Greenpoint, she hurried along certain familiar streets until she arrived at her own dwelling. It was now a little after ten o'clock. She had an instinct that it was about this time. Above the high piazza, both parlor-windows were dark, but below it the windows of the basement portion were brightly lit. She passed into the scant space of garden and sought the lower door; she pulled the bell, set in the woodwork at her right, and waited.
No answer came, and she rang again. One of the side-lights gave her a good view into the hall beyond. She presently saw her mother appear. Mrs. Twining opened the door. It was not till she and her daughter stood face to face that the latter made a certain sharp, abrupt discovery.
"Mother!" she said, "you're pale—you look very strange. Is it because I staid away so long?"