As soon as Jason returned, Mahala went through the directors’ room and down the hall where she was in sight of the mob. As soon as they saw her, quiet fell upon them. She advanced to the front door, and unlocking it, she threw it wide. Then she stepped out, lifting her hands for silence. Before she had time to speak, the sheriff came down the outer stairway and took up his place beside her. At sight of him, a babel of cries broke from the mob and they surged forward, shouting: “Where are they?”
Mahala began to speak. When they heard her voice, silence again fell on the mob.
“Men and women of Ashwater, I have this to tell you,” she said in a clear, cold voice. “I admit the justice of your anger, but none of you has so great cause against the Morelands as I have. I admit that they have escaped me, and I am here to tell you that they have escaped you. The sheriff and the men accompanying him found Junior lying in his room. He has made the great crossing by his own hand. He admitted to three of us, and in the presence of his father, that he had taken his own life. That was his admission of guilt. When his father realized this and turned from it to see a ghostly spectre of his past standing before him, a strain that must have been of long duration, gave way. Dying, Rebecca Sampson cursed him and declared that the punishment God had meted out to him was to spend the remainder of his life carrying the white flag and preaching the doctrine of purity as her conscience has forced her to do all these years among us. Coming from the sight of Junior’s ghastly face, his father saw the flag that Becky had decreed that he should carry. He had brain enough to recognize the justice of the obligation. He is standing in the directors’ room with it now. I beg that you will agree with me that this is finished. I beg that you will stand back quietly and let him pass; let us lead him to his home and turn him over to another woman who does not deserve punishment, yet who will be bitterly punished by the sins of the Morelands. Men of Ashwater, will you let an insane man pass?”
Slowly the faces of the mob changed. The snarling anger, the hatred, began to fade. A few in the immediate foreground stepped back. Others held their places. Suddenly, Mahala leaned forward. “If you will let him pass unmolested,” she said, “I will promise you this. A committee shall be appointed, headed by Albert Rich, and the claims of each one of you and your papers shall be carefully investigated, and where wrongs have been committed you shall have back your property. I know that Mrs. Moreland will agree to this, and I know that the courts of the county will compel it. Now, will you let us pass?”
Slowly the mob fell back. Mahala turned and beckoned to the doorway. A minute later there appeared in it the shaking form of Martin Moreland. His clothing was in disorder, his white hair disarranged; his face was ghastly. With his left hand he was clinging to Jason, who could scarcely support him; in the right he was clutching the osier that bore the white flag, at that minute stained with the blood from Rebecca Sampson’s broken head. The sheriff stepped to his side and assisted Jason. Between them he advanced to the steps leading to the sidewalk. Fear had fled the face of Martin Moreland with the going of his reason. In still amazement the mob saw him swing over them the blood-stained banner and heard his voice, flat and toneless, begin a sort of chant in the exact words with which Rebecca had familiarized them through many long years: “Behold the emblem of purity! Clean hearts may pass under with God’s blessing. Come, ye workers of darkness, wash your hearts clean by passing under the white flag!”
Slowly the look of hate and of anger faded from the faces of the people. There is in the average mob at bottom a sense of justice. They are moved to the course they take by indignation over a great wrong, but there is always the possibility of their being swayed quickly, as they were swayed at that minute by the fact that Martin Moreland was insane. Had he stood there, clothed in his right mind, they would have fallen upon him and torn him like beasts. Bereft of his reason, he was a helpless, childish thing. Not one of them cared to touch his soiled, repulsive body. Silently they drew back; they allowed him to go down the steps and to make his way toward his home unmolested. There was a look more of pity than of anger upon their faces as they saw his shaking hands, his tottering step, and heard the high, strained quality of the voice that besought every one he met to pass under the white flag.
CHAPTER XXII
“Behind the Lilac Wall”
As soon as it was possible for Mahala to escape from the Moreland residence, she left Ashwater and was driven back to her home. She sought it instinctively as a shelter. It seemed to her that the River Road was unending, that she never again would see the light of her house; and because there was no light when she reached it, she was surprised at last to find that she was there. As a haven she plunged into it and closed the door behind her to shut out the horrors she had witnessed. Predominant in her mind at that minute was the thought that there was nothing in the whole world so dreadful as the power of riches wrongly used. When she thought back to the peace, the happiness, the sheer beauty of her childhood and her home life, it seemed to her quite impossible that such disaster as had overtaken her had been made possible by the unscrupulous power of one man holding his position through the right of riches dishonestly accumulated. After the passing of her father, after the testing of her own strength, she had found that she was sufficient; that she could take care of herself and of her mother as well. There was the possibility that she might find a confident sort of happiness in facing life and making it clothe and provision her that she never would have found had she gone ahead under her father’s sheltering care. She had come dimly to realize that the sheltered life is rather a dull affair. It lacks the spirit, the development, the fraternity that can be found in an equal battle with other men and women for food and shelter.
Then had come the final blow. The Morelands had heaped dishonour upon her. From that hour she had felt that to be vindicated was the only thing that life held in store for her. Now the thing had happened. A thousand people had rushed around her. They had almost crushed her in their desire to touch her, to weep with her, to tell her that they always had known that she never could have been guilty. And there had been an impulse hot in her soul to cry out at them: “Why, then, was I deserted? Why, then, was I left alone? Why, then, did you not rise up and make the thing that happened to me impossible as you have made it impossible for the work of the Morelands upon their fellow men to continue?”