At last, worn out with mental and moral wrestlings, she turned to her father for help. Lincoln was working at high pressure and he had some perplexities of debts. She shrank from troubling him.
Her heart must have beat in slow, suffocating throbs when she crept to her father’s arms and confessed her fears:
What if McNamar should come back!
She need not trouble her golden head about that! The country would be too hot to hold him. Lincoln had thrashed the breath out of a man for swearing before women in his store.
But what if he still loved her, trusted her, was on his way back, confident and happy, to claim her? What if he could lift this veil of mystery and stand forth clear and manly?
McNamar would never appear in such guise, bless her innocent heart. He was a black-hearted scoundrel. In the old days, in South Carolina, men of the Rutledge breed would have killed such a hound. But he was alarmed now, surely, at this strange obsession, and questioned her. And then the whole piteous truth was out.
She was afraid he would come back—shuddering at the thought—come back to reproach her with pale face and stricken eyes. And she loved him no longer. She had been so happy this summer, and then it began to seem all wrong. Love forsaken was such pain and bewilderment. Could she endure happiness purchased at the price of another’s misery?
McNamar had come back, indeed, and love was impotent to defend this hapless innocence! She had never understood his behaviour. Incapable of such baseness herself, she had never comprehended his. Like a flower she had been blighted by the frost of his desertion, and had revived to brief, pale life in a new sun; but the blight had struck to the root.
But what beauty of soul was here revealed, adding poignancy to grief! No one had quite known her. Physically so perfect, no one had divined those exquisite subtleties of the heart that made her hold on life tenuous. Lincoln was sent for but he was not found at once, for his employments kept him roving far afield. Round and round, in constantly contracting circles, her inverted reason, goaded by an accusing conscience ran until, at last, her sick fancy pictured herself as the faithless one. The event was forgotten—she remembered only the agony of love forsaken. And so she slipped away into the delirium of brain fever.
Lincoln had one anguished hour with her in a brief return to consciousness. It was in the living-room of a pioneer log-cabin, untouched by grace or beauty; homely, useful things about them, the light on her face coming through a clapboard door open to the sun and wind of an unspoiled landscape. The houses of the wealthiest farmers were seldom more than two big rooms and a sleeping loft, and privacy the rarest, most difficult privilege. Her stricken family was in the kitchen, or out of doors, to give them this hour of parting alone. What was said between them is unrecorded. When she fell into a coma, Lincoln stumbled out of that death-chamber like a soul gone blind and groping. Two days later Ann Rutledge died.