VII
When Nicholas left Eugenia it was to stride blindly towards his father's gate. The rage which had stunned him into silence before the girl now leaped and crackled like flame in his blood. His throat was parched and he saw red like a man who kills.
Passing his home, he kept on to Kingsborough, and once within the shadow of the wood, he broke into a run, flying from himself and from the goad of his wrath. As he ran, he felt with a kind of alien horror that to meet Bernard Battle face to face in this hour would be to do murder—murder too mild for the man who had lied away his friend's honour for the sake of the whiteness of his own skin. It was the injustice that he resented with a holy rage—the hideous fact that a clean man should be spotted to save an unclean one the splashing he merited.
And Eugenia also—he hated Eugenia that he had kept her image untarnished in his thoughts; that he had allowed the desire for no other woman to shadow it. He had held himself as a temple for the worship of her; he had permitted no breath of defilement to blow upon the altar—and this was his reward. This—that the woman he loved had hurled the first stone at the mere lifting of a Pharisaical finger—that she had loved him and had turned from him when the first word was uttered—as she would not have turned from the brother of her blood had he been damned in Holy Writ. It was for this that he hated her.
The light of the sunset shining through the wood fell dull gold on his pathway. A strong wind was blowing among the trees, and the dried leaves were torn from the boughs and hurled roughly to the earth, when they sped onward to rest against the drifts by the roadside. The sound of the wind was deep and hoarse like the baying of distant hounds, and beneath it, in plaintive minor, ran the sighing of the leaves before his footsteps. Through the wood came the vague smells of autumn—a reminiscent waft of decay, the reek of mould on rotting logs, the effluvium of overblown flowers, the healthful smack of the pines. By dawn frost would grip the vegetation and the wind would lull; but now it blew, strong and clear, scattering before it withered growths and subtle scents of death.
Out of the wood, Nicholas came on the highway again, and turned to where the afterglow burnished the windows of Kingsborough. He followed the road instinctively—as he had followed it daily from his childhood up, beating out the impression of his own footsteps in the dust, obliterating his old, even tracks by the reckless tramp of his delirium.
When he reached the college grounds he paused from the same dazed impulse and looked back upon the west through the quiet archway of the long brick building. The place was desolate with the desolation of autumn. Through the funereal arch he saw the sunset barred by a network of naked branches, while about him the darkening lawn was veiled with the melancholy drift of the leaves. The only sound of life came from a brood of turkeys settling to roost in a shivering aspen.
He turned and walked rapidly up the main street, where a cloud of dust hung suspended. Past the court-house, across the green, past the little whitewashed gaol, where in a happier season roses bloomed—out into the open country where the battlefields were grim with headless corn rows—he walked until he could walk no further, and then wheeled about to retrace heavily his way. His rage was spent; his pulses faltered from fatigue, and the red flashes faded from before his eyes.
When he reached home supper was over, and Nannie sat sewing in the little room adjoining the kitchen.
"You're late for supper," she said idly as he entered. "Sairy Jane's gone to bed with a headache and ma's in a temper. I'll get you something as soon as I've done this seam."