Enoch passed three days without seeing Esther, hoping she might send for him. On the fourth day he went to dinner and she treated him as if nothing were the matter. She hardly knew there was. That made it much worse. Then he flourished the wound by pretending heroically to conceal it. That method will work only provided the woman cares and loves the child in her man. Esther did not care. She refused to discover the hurt. The man’s last recourse is to injure the woman, to ease himself by hurting her. Enoch became oppressive. He began to mention the things that should be rendered unto Cæsar, categorically, gratuitously; he revealed the laws of Gib; he appointed how the concavities of her life should correspond to the convexities of his; he spoke of penalties, forfeits and consequences, and of the ancient legal principle that ignorance of the statutes is no defence provided the statutes have been duly published. She listened with wide-open eyes. He believed he inspired her with admiration for the stern stuff he was made of, and thus blindly sought his fate.
So his hurt was revenged but in no wise healed.
On the eve of their wedding day, at dinner, Aaron’s name was pronounced. The invisible circumstances were tragic. Enoch happened at that instant to be regarding Esther with a sensation that was new to him and very disturbing. He knew not what to do with it. Suddenly he had been seized with a great longing for her, a yearning of the heart toward the fact of her being that was savage, tender and desolate. He wondered that Esther and her father both were not aware of this singular and dramatic occurrence. It shook him like an earth tremor. An impulse to speak, to shout, to cry out words of fantastic meaning, to rise and touch her, became almost uncontrollable,—almost. It occurred to him for the first time, like a blow, that he had never discovered her nature, her true self. He had not tried. The importance of doing so, the possibility of it, had not been thought of. But he would. He would begin all over again to get acquainted with her.
In that moment he loved her.
And it was then,—just then,—that he heard the sound of Aaron’s name. He could not say which one of them uttered it. The sound was all he knew. Instantly the hideous, stinging adder upraised from his depths and began striking at the walls of his breast. Vividly, stereoptically, as a series of pictures, there flashed across his mental vision every situation in which he had seen Aaron and Esther together.
He had been able to control the impulse of love to vent its untimely ecstasy; his rage he could not govern.
To Esther’s and her father’s amazement he began, with no apparent provocation whatever, to utter against Aaron defamations of an extreme and irrevocable character. His manner contradicted the violence of his feelings. It was self-possessed, one would almost say restrained; that was his way under stress of emotional excitement. At no point did he become incoherent. His words were chilled and came to him easily. One might have thought he was thinking out loud, very earnestly, in solitude. On his face was that singular Gib expression, never witnessed before in the Mitchell household,—the mouth contortion one mistook for a smile. So far as Esther and Mitchell could see the performance was gratuitous and premeditated. It had gone far before they realized that his state was one of passion. But that discovery had no mitigating value. They made no effort to stop him. He spoke of things that are supposed to be unmentionable, and of his private intentions, and closed abruptly with the declaration that Aaron should never be received in his house as a guest.
“Let that be understood,” he said to Esther. Then he rose from the table and departed.
Mitchell was stupefied. He looked slowly at Esther. Her face was a perfect mask.
“Do you know what it means?” he asked.