There was some relief to Shirley’s overcharged feelings in the very discomfort of the drenched weather: the sucking pull of the wet clay on her boots and the flirt of the drops on her cheeks and hair. She thrust her dog-skin gloves into her pocket and held her arms outstretched to let the wind blow through her fingers. The moisture clung in damp wreaths to her hair and rolled in great drops down her coat as she went.
The wildest, most secluded walks had always drawn her most and she instinctively chose one of these to-day. It was the road whereon squatted Mad Anthony’s whitewashed cabin. “Dah’s er man gwine look in dem eyes, honey, en gwine make ’em cry en cry.” She had forgotten the incident of that day, when he had read her fortune, but now the quavering prophecy came back to her with a shivering sense of reality. “Fo’ dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’ afeahd. Et’s de thing whut eat de ha’at outen de breas’—dat whut she afeahd of!” If it were only fire and water that threatened her!
She struck her hands together with an inarticulate cry. She remembered the laugh in Valiant’s eyes as they had planted the roses, the characteristic gesture with which he tossed the waving hair from his forehead—how she had named the ducks and the peacock and chosen the spots for his flowers; and she smiled for such memories, even in the stabbing knowledge that these dear trivial things could mean nothing to her in the future. She tried to realize that he was gone from her life, that he was the one man on earth whom to marry would be to strike to the heart her love and loyalty to her mother, and she said this over and over to herself in varying phrases:
“You can’t! No matter how much you love him, you can’t! His father deliberately ruined your mother’s life—your own mother! It’s bad enough to love him—you can’t help that. But you can help marrying him. You would hate yourself. You can never kiss him again, or feel his arms around you. You can’t touch his hand. You mustn’t even see him. Not if it breaks your heart—as your mother’s heart was broken!”
She had turned into an unbeaten way that ambled from the road through a track of tall oaks and pines, scarce more than a bridle-path, winding aimlessly through bracken-strewn depths so dense that even the wild-roses had not found them. In her childish hurts she had always fled to the companionship of the trees. She had known them every one—the black-gum and pale dogwood and gnarled hickory, the prickly-balled “button-wood,” the lowly mulberry and the majestic red oak and walnut. They had seemed friendly and pitying counselors, standing about her with arms intertwined. Now, with the rain weeping in soughing gusts through them, they offered her no comfort. She suddenly threw herself face down on the soaked moss.
“Oh, God!” she cried. “I love him so! And I had only that one evening. It doesn’t seem just. If I could only have him, and suffer some other way! He’s suffering, too, and it isn’t our fault! We neither of us harmed any one! He isn’t responsible for what his father did—why, he hardly knew him! Oh, God, why must it be so hard for us? Millions of other people love each other and nothing separates them like this!”
Shirley’s warm breath made a little fog against the star-eyed moss. She was scarcely conscious of her wet and clinging clothing, and the soaked strands of her hair. She was so wrapped in her desolation that she no longer heard the sound of the persevering rain and the wet swishing of the bushes—parting now to a hurried step that fell almost without sound on the spongy forest soil. She started up suddenly to see Valiant before her.
He was in a somewhat battered walking suit of brown khaki, with a leather belt and a felt hat whose brim, stiff with the wet, was curved down visor-wise over his brow. In an instant he had drawn her upright, and they stood, looking at each other, drenched and trembling.
“How can you?” he said with a roughness that sounded akin to anger. “Here in this atrocious weather—like this!” he laid a hand on her arm. “You’re wet through.”