But there are lusts mightier, momentarily, than love, and the lust of vengeance is one. He made as if he did not see or hear; and lest she should overtake him, left the path to lose himself among the trees and to vault the low boundary wall into the pike at a point safely out of sight from the gate.
XXXV
A SOUL IN SHACKLES
The blue autumn night haze had almost the consistency of a cloud when Gordon leaped the wall and set his face toward the iron-works. Or rather it was like the depths of a translucent sea in which the distant electric lights of Mountain View Avenue shone as blurs of phosphorescent life on one hand, and the great dark bulk of Lebanon loomed as the massive foundations of a shadowy island on the other.
Farther on, the recurring flare from the tall vent of the blast-furnace lighted the haze depths weirdly, turning the mysterious sea bottom into fathomless abysses of dull-red incandescence for the few seconds of its duration—a slow lightning flash submerged and half extinguished.
Gordon was passing the country colony's church when one of the torch-like flares reddened on the night, and the glow picked out the gilt cross at the top of the sham Norman tower. He flung up a hand involuntarily, as if to put the emblem, and that for which it stood, out of his life. At the same instant a whiff of the acrid smoke from the distant furnace fires tingled in his nostrils, and he quickened his pace. The hour for which all other hours had been waiting had struck. Love had called, and religion had made its silent protest; but the smell in his nostrils was the smoky breath of Mammon, the breath which has maddened a world: he strode on doggedly, thinking only of his triumph and how he should presently compass it.
The two great poplar-trees, sentineling what had once been the gate of the old Gordon homestead, had been spared through all the industrial changes. When he would have opened the wicket to pass on to the log-house offices, an armed man stepped from behind one of the trees with an oath in his mouth and his gun-butt drawn up to strike. Before the blow could fall, the furnace flare blazed aloft like a mighty torch, and the man grounded his weapon.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gordon; I—I took ye for somebody else," he stammered; and Tom scanned his face sharply by the light of the burning gases.