“That was two months ago. Up to last Wednesday everything went as merry as a marriage bell. The father liked me, the mother tolerated me, and the young woman—but let that pass. I was welcome enough, and sufficient unto the day was the good thereof. As a matter of course, I was living in a fool’s paradise, walking daily over a mine that any chance spark might explode. I knew all that, and yet I was happy till last Wednesday. That was when the mine was fired.
“It came about in the most natural way, but the story is too long to write out, and I don’t mean to weary you needlessly. It is enough to say that the mother found me out. You can guess what happened. I went to the house, knowing nothing of what was in store for me. There was a little scene in which I played the heavy villain to the mother’s part of outraged virtue—and the end of it is that I am once more a pariah.
“I didn’t see the young woman; that wasn’t permitted, of course. But I suppose she knows all about it, and the thought makes me want to run amuck. In the whole dreary business there is only this single grain of comfort: I know who gave me away. And when I meet that man, God do so to me and more if I don’t send him where he belongs, and that without benefit of clergy. And you won’t say me nay when I tell you that his name is Harding.
“I suppose you will want to know what I am going to do next. I don’t know, and that is God’s truth. The day after the thing happened I meant to vanish; but the chief was away and I couldn’t very well shut up the office and walk out. Since then the mill has been grinding until I don’t know what I want to do. Sometimes I am tempted to throw the whole thing overboard and go back to the hog wallow. It is about all I am fit for; and nobody cares—unless you do.
“For pity’s sake write me a letter and brace me up if you can; I never needed it worse. The chief is still away; I can’t do another stroke of work till he comes back with the field books, and there isn’t a soul here that I can talk to. Consequently I’m going mad by inches. I suppose you have taken it for granted that I love the young woman, though I believe I haven’t said so in so many words. I do, and that is what racks me. If I go away, I give her up for good and all. If I stay I can’t get her. If I go to the devil again—but we won’t discuss that phase of it now. Write, and hold me to my word, if you love me.”
This letter was mailed on the train Wednesday evening, and in the ordinary course of events it should have brought an answer by the Saturday. This Brant knew, and he set himself to wear out the interval with what constancy there was in him, doing nothing more irrational than the devoting of two of the evenings to aimless trampings in the Highlands, presumably in the unacknowledged hope that he might chance to see Dorothy at a distance. He did not see her, did not venture near enough to Altamont Terrace to stand any chance of seeing her, and when the Saturday passed without bringing a letter from Hobart, hope deferred gave birth to heaviness.
“He is disgusted, I suppose, and I can’t blame him,” was his summing up of it when the postman had made his final round. “God in heaven, I wish the colonel would come back and give me my quittance! If I have to sit here and grill through many more days I shall be ripe for any devil’s sickle of them all!”
By which it will appear that despairing impulse was already straining at the bit. None the less, when six o’clock came he went home, ate his supper, read till midnight, and then went to bed, though not to sleep. On the morrow, which was the Sunday, he set on foot a little emprise the planning of which had eased him through the wakeful hours of the night. It was this: Dorothy had a class in a mission school, and this he knew, and the place, but not the hour. For the latter ignorance he was thankful, since it gave him an excuse for haunting the neighbourhood of the mission chapel during the better part of the day. Late in the afternoon he was rewarded by catching a glimpse of her as she went in, and, heartened by this, he did sentry duty on the opposite side of the street until the school was dismissed.
She came out among the last with a group of children around her, and Brant’s heart went warm at the sight. “God bless her!” he said under his breath; and then he crossed the street to put his fate to the touch. If she knew—if her mother had told her—her greeting would show it forth, and he would know then that the worst had befallen.
They met at the corner, and Dorothy looked up as she was bidding her children good-bye. He made sure she saw him, though there was no sign of recognition in her eyes. Then she bent over one of the little ones as if to avoid him, and he went on quickly with rage and shame in his heart, and the devil’s sickle gathering in the harvest which had been ripening through the days of bitterness.