After awhile his brother-in-law raised his head and gave Darcy a keen glance.
“Anything gone wrong, Darcy?”
“No, Mase, nothing wrong. New line, that’s all. Been working on the wrong dope, I guess. Going to try a new line. But first I’ve got something to do. May take a long time. May be only a few days. Don’t let Ellen worry. I’ll write if there’s any need.”
He went the next day. Mason Knox and Dan Peterson were the only two in Meadow Brook who knew anything about his going, and that was all they knew. When people began to make inquiries Mason Knox answered with: “I couldn’t say. He might and he might not be back soon. That depends.”
When Dan Peterson heard that Darcy had disappeared from his usual haunts, heard first through his own son, who was a devotee of the baseball field on afternoons, he looked thoughtful, and wise, and went and told his father.
And Darcy had a strange method of going. He did not take the train, nor buy a ticket. He waited until night—no one quite remembered when they saw Darcy Sherwood last, when it came right down to the question some months afterward. Even the sharp-eyed Tyke, who was vigilant night and day as soon as his eyes were open to the necessity, had somehow missed his movements.
Darcy went at night, alone, without baggage or any impedimenta whatever; first to the graveyard, where he took from a tangle of grass and weeds under the hedge on the outer edge of the next field a pick and shovel that came strangely to hand, and went silently and deftly to a spot that he seemed to know well.
Here he worked for half an hour or more, lifting sod and soil from the place and setting them aside, as if he had done it before, pausing now and again to listen to a stir in the hedge or to mark the scuttling of a wild rabbit. Then, after a longer pause than usual, there came the sound of soft clinking, crashing; the gurgle of liquid coming through a small aperture, yet muffled, as if it were flowing underground. For a long time this went on, while Darcy stood watching the darkness, listening to the distance, identifying each falling leaf and stir in the shadows among the weird shafts of marble, and sighing cedars of the cemetery.
After a time he put back the soil and the sods into place, laid the pick and the shovel in the bed of a little creek just over in the next field, where the water tinkled over it harmlessly and obliterated all finger-marks from its handle; and then stole away down the road, leaving behind, in the place of the dead, a strange, penetrating, unmistakable odor, which by morning would be purged away and escape into the elements.
Down in the road he paused, where he had encountered Joyce, and for a moment let his soul feel all that he had felt then—the delicacy of her hallowed touch, the thrill of her presence so near him, followed by the scorching shame that she should find him here, and by her question, with its piercing meaning, its wise conclusion, its sorrowing rebuke. The deep, wonderful look in her eyes as the flashlight revealed his identity to her, of recognition and of hurt surprise—he felt it all again! The tone of that voice that from his childhood he had treasured like the beautiful song of a bird in the holiest place in his heart. It was almost as if he suddenly felt that for a moment God was looking at him through her eyes, and he too saw himself as God saw him, and did not like it.