To stay here would be absolutely impossible.
As she walked without noticing whither she was going her mind cleared, she began to form plans.
She would go that very day. Nothing would stop her. The thing had to be done. Let it be done at once. She would explain everything to Miss Pinckney. She would escape without seeing Richard again. What she was proposing to herself was death, the ruin of everything she cared for, the destruction of all the ties that bound her to the world, the present and the past. It was the recognition that these ties had been broken for her and all these things taken away by the woman who had taken away Richard.
Presently she found herself in the suburbs, in a street where coloured children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If she returned to Vernons by ten o’clock it would give her plenty of time to pack her things, say good-bye to Miss Pinckney and take her departure before Richard returned to luncheon—if he did return.
It did not take her long to pass through the negro quarter, and now, out in the open country, out amidst those great flat lands in the broad day and under the lonely blue sky her mood changed.
Phyl was no patient Grizel, the very last person to be trapped in the bog of love’s despondency. Abstract melancholy produced by colours, memories, or sounds was an easy enough matter with her, but she was not the person to mourn long over the loss of a man snatched from her by another woman.
As she walked, now, breathing the free fresh air, a feeling of anger and resentment began to fill her mind. Anger at first against Frances Rhett but spreading almost at once towards Richard Pinckney. Soon it included herself, Maria Pinckney, Charleston—the whole world. It was the anger which brings with it perfect recklessness, akin to that which had seized her the day in Ireland when in her rage over Rafferty’s dismissal she had called Pinckney a Beast. Only this anger was less acute, more diffuse, more lasting.
The sounds of wheels and horses’ hoofs on the road behind her made her turn her head. A carriage was approaching, an English mail phaëton drawn by two high-stepping chestnuts and driven by a young man.
It was Silas Grangerson. Returning to Grangerson’s to make plans for the capture of Phyl, here she was on the road before him and going in the same direction.
For a moment he could scarcely believe his eyes. Then reining in and leaving the horses with the groom he jumped down and ran towards her.