“I can only see one thing clearly—that you are wrong, and you’ll see it. Only somehow I can’t make you see it yet!
“Daunt.”
V.
The warm October weather lay over the Drennen homestead at Warne. This was a house gigantic and austere, its gray stone walls throwing into relief its red brick porch, veined with ivy stems, like an Indian’s face, whose warrior blood is raging, leant against a rock boulder.
Under the shade of the falling vine-fringe Margaret sat, passive and quiet, on the veranda. From under drooping lids, long-lashed, her brown eyes looked out with a sort of sweet and sober studiousness. Her reddish-brown hair appeared the color of old metal beaten by the hammer here and there into a lighter flick of gold, rolling back from her straight forehead and caught in a loose, low knot. The corners of her mouth were lifted a little, giving an extra fulness to sensitive lips, and the long rise of her cheek, from chin to temple, was without a dimple.
The haze hung an opal tint over the blue hillsides and lent to nearer objects a dreamy unreality. The atmosphere reflected Margaret’s mood. She was conscious of a certain tired numbness. Her acts of the past few weeks had a sort of elusiveness in perspective, and the old house at Warne, with its gloomy stables, taciturn servants, its familiar occupants—even she herself—seemed to possess a curious unreality.
Across the field ran the wavering fringe of willow which marked the little sluggish brook with the foot-log, where often she had waded, slim-legged, as a child. There was the old stable loft from which she had once fallen, hunting for pigeons’ eggs. There were the same gloomy holes under the eaves, from which awful bat shapes had issued for her childish shuddering. Only the master of the house was changed, and he was Melwin Drennen, Lydia’s husband. As a child, he had carried her on his shoulders over the fields when she had visited the place. She had liked him unaffectedly, and the great sorrow of his life had hurt her also.
She was a mere child then, and had heard it with a vague and wondering pain. It had been a much-talked-of match—that between her cousin and this man—and it was only a week after the wedding, at this same old place, that the accident had happened. Lydia had been thrown from her horse. She was carried back to a house of mourning. The decorations were taken from the walls, and great surgeons came down from the city to ponder, shake their heads, and depart. He, loving much, had hoped against hope. Margaret remembered hearing how he had sat all one night outside her door, silent, with his head against the wainscoting and his hands tight together—the night they said she would die.