“Queer Dick, you,” mused Ben. “It’s just as I said. You don’t belong to any kind of folks I ever see before. I can’t make you out.”
“Next time you want to murder me, Ben,” called the minister cheerily, “don’t try anonymous traps! Show up like a man, and have it out in the open air!”
He walked on towards the beach. Ben watched him for a perplexed and sullen moment, then took his course thoughtfully in the direction of the town.
When the two men had disappeared from the dark map of the downs, a woman’s figure swiftly and quietly crossed it. Jane Granite had followed the minister like the spaniel that she was, and, hidden in the shadows of Ragged Rock, thinking to save him, God knew how, from Heaven knew what fate, had overheard the interview from beginning to end.
XVIII.
A fiery July was followed by a scorching August. There was a long drought, and simooms of fine, irritating dust. The gasping town and inland country flocked to the coast in more than the usual force. The hotels brimmed over. Even Windover fanned herself, and lay in hammocks lazily, watching for the two o’clock east wind to stir the topsails of the schooners trying under full canvas to crawl around the Point. In Angel Alley the heat was something unprecedented; and the devil shook hands with discomfort as he is fain to, and made new comrades.
Bayard was heavily overworked. He gave himself few pleasures, after the fashion of the man; and the summer people at the Point knew him not. He was not of them, nor of their world. Afterwards, he recalled, with a kind of pain lacking little of anguish, how few in number had been his evenings in the cool parlor of the cottage, where the lace curtains blew in and out through the purple twilight, or on the impearled harbor, in the dory, when the sun went down, and he drifted with her between earth and heaven, between light and reflection, in a glamour of color, in alternations of quiet, dangerous talk, and of more dangerous silence; brief, stolen hours when duty seemed a dimming dream, and human joy the only reality, the sole value, the decreed and eternal end of life. Upon this rare and scanty substitute for happiness he fed; and from it he fled.
Between his devotions and his desertions the woman stood mute and inscrutable. And while they still moved apart, saying, “The summer is before us,” lo, the petals of the Cape roses had flown on the hot winds, the goldenrod was lifting its sword of flame on the undulating gray downs, and the summer was spent.