Alice Thayor slept soundly until midnight, then she lay awake until the first glimmer of dawn. She half rose upon her elbow and looked calmly at the face of her husband asleep next to her. It seemed strange to her to be sleeping next to him. His face was drawn and haggard; he breathed heavily. Margaret was curled next to her on the other side, the curve of her lovely mouth showing above the coarse edge of the horse blanket.
Then an irresistible desire came over her to get away—away from this misery—out of these rough clothes—away from these men. The fire in front of her blazed up, illumining the thatched roof of the lean-to. She looked at her hands—they were dirty, the nails black from scrambling over logs. At that moment she would eagerly have exchanged her jewels for a boudoir and a bath. Her jewels—they were gone in the fire. Gone, too, before it began were a packet of letters and a tell-tale photograph! This fact was the only one in her desolation that comforted her.
Then came moments when her surroundings became exasperating; what fresh misery would she be forced to endure—days worse, perhaps, than the one she had just passed through might follow. If she could only fly! But where? Out in that wilderness? She had sense enough left to know that had she stolen out beyond sight of the lean-to she would have been hopelessly lost. She did not know, however, all that it meant; the terror that would await her—the suffering, stumbling blindly in a circle—hungry, yet afraid to eat had she had food—thirsty, yet not daring to stop even at a clear spring. Her body beaten and bruised—her mind weak from fear—half naked—her hair dishevelled, her scalp bleeding; reeling toward any quarter which seemed like the way out. All this, had she but known it, had happened to the three men sleeping in the lean-to: the trapper, when he was eighteen, found barely breathing after twelve days of torture, the dog chain which he had wrapped round his waist after starting a deer, having deflected the needle of his compass; Holcomb, picking his way out along the shores of a chain of lakes, with no matches and but a handful of cartridges; and the Clown, blind drunk on Jamaica ginger and peppermint essence, in a country whose unfamiliarity nearly caused his death. A man without his stomach and physique would have died; by some miracle he lived to reach Morrison's unaided—he wanted a drink.
And yet there was not a portion of this wilderness that could lose these three men now, past masters as they were in the art of wood-craft. Yes—it was just as well that The Lady of Big Shanty knew none of these things. Miserable as she was, here, she was protected. Her hand went out unconsciously and rested for a moment on her husband. Again she fell asleep—a troubled sleep—in which she dreamed she confronted a face with sinister eyes and hot cheeks from which she fled in terror. When she awoke she looked out into a blanket of mist. In the breaking dawn the surface of Bear Pond lay like a mirror. The others were still asleep. The fire in front of the lean-to was a bed of white ashes. A kingfisher screamed past, following the limpid turquoise edge of the shore. Beyond the mist rose a great mountain, the filmy, ragged edges of the fog blanket sweeping in curling rifts beneath a precipice of black sides.
The sun presently turned the mist into rose vapour; the mirror became a greenish black, shining like polished metal. She looked out upon this scene with a sense of restful fascination. It was the first sunrise of its kind this woman—to whom morning meant the perfunctory drawing of her bedroom curtains—had seen for years. It was as if she had been transported to a new world, shutting out the other world she had known so well—the world in which she had fluttered so successfully, spending lavishly the money of the man who at that moment lay next to her, worn out by calamity and fatigue. He had been patient through years of her unreasonable extravagance—through her selfish domination—through her tyranny. He was patient now.
Alice Thayor thought of these things as she gazed out upon the strange, silent pond. It was the first time in her later life she had taken time to think. Mental anguish has its sudden changes. When we have suffered enough we seek the pleasant; to suffer requires effort. When at last we shirk the work of being unhappy we forget our sorrow. Alice, little by little, was forgetting hers—even in the midst of these trying circumstances.
Soon she noticed that Margaret's blanket had slipped from her shoulders. She leaned forward and drew it tenderly back to its place; then she bent over and kissed the cheek of the sleeping girl.
The grip of the primaeval had laid hold of her heart!
When she again gazed across the thin rose vapour, disappearing rapidly under the first rays of the sun, hot, scalding tears were streaming down her face.