Again the gentleman turned to her, as she spoke, with a sudden emotion in his eyes that would have called the color to her cheeks had she seen it, but in another instant he had looked away, and the troubled cloud settled back once more upon his features.
“The river is beautiful,” he said, after a pause; “see how the fire dances down its surface.”
He had dismissed the subject from their conversation, if not from his own thoughts. More than an hour later Helen sprang up with a conscious blush upon her face as the sound of approaching voices told her how the time had fled. Ah, for her at least it had been wafted by on silver wings! They both joined the party, and all went together to the house. There, almost immediately, Mr. Safford excused himself and went to his room.
Shut in alone, the same anxious, troubled expression he had worn when he looked unconsciously up the river came back upon him as he walked thoughtfully to and fro across the floor. The incident at the foundry had affected him singularly. He could not throw off its depressing influence. Why, he asked himself—why did the face of the old man haunt him perpetually—the thin, wrinkled face, as it had looked at him with sudden surprise and terror struggling up through its watery eyes? Why did the cracked voice, with its accent of fright, ring constantly in his ears? If it were but the wild vagary of an unsettled mind, why should he give it any heed? “I am nervous,” he muttered to himself. “They said the man was crazy, and surely I never saw him before—no, I never saw him before. Then why should the sight of me have so excited him? Probably another stranger would have done the same. I am foolish—and they said the man was crazy—”
He still paced the floor of his room up and down, while he tried to argue himself out of the unreasonable hold which the circumstance had taken on his mind. “I wish I could forget it!” he exclaimed. Then walking to the window, and looking out mechanically, he said slowly to himself, as if weighing well his words,—
“It is not possible; no, it is not possible that here I am going to find any clew. The man was crazy, that is all.”
He returned again, however, not the least relieved, to his track over the carpet, and, before he went down stairs, he had determined that he would “wait and see.” He would not, as he had previously intended, leave the place within a day or two. He could not go away until he had satisfied himself about the matter wholly, and in the mean time he would find out what he could in regard to the old man.
He did not make any inquiries of the family, and the only information he could gain was simply what he had been already told.
His sleep that night was strangely disturbed. Over and over in his troubled slumber a thin, shrunken figure stood with its trembling arm stretched out toward him. It was always before him, even when sometimes there flitted through his dreams the form of one whose face was fair as the morning, whose hair was yellow as the reaper’s wheat. He rose feeling little refreshed. The night, instead of lessening, had but strengthened the hold which the incident of the previous day had taken upon him, and against which he struggled without avail.
The colonel’s prophecy did not prove incorrect when he said Simlin could not last long, for, just as the family were rising from the breakfast-table, a messenger arrived, saying the old man was lying insensible in his cabin. It seemed he did not make his appearance at the foundry at his usual time, and, after waiting an hour in vain, Hendricks, who suspected something might be wrong, sent one of the hands to the hut, where he was found in this condition.