He went over to the hearth, poked the ashes, and discovered life. He laid on wood, slowly feeding the hungry sparks, then he took his old place by the table, blew out the light of the lamp and in the dark room, shot by the flares of the igniting logs, he resigned himself to what lay before.
Rivers might return with Maclin. This was a new possibility and disconcerting; still it must be met.
“I may kill a flock of birds by one interview,” Northrup grimly thought and then drifted off on Maclin’s trail. The ever-recurring wonder about the Point was intensified; he must leave that still in doubt.
“I’ll get the damned thing in my own control, if I can,” he concluded at length. “Buy it up for safety; keep still about it and watch how Maclin reacts when he knocks against the fact, eventually. That will make things safe for the present.”
But to own the Point meant to hold on to King’s Forest just when he had decided to turn from it forever––after setting Mary-Clare free.
The sense of a spiritual overlord for an instant daunted Northrup. It was humiliating to realize how he had been treading, all along, one course while believing he was going another. And then––it was close upon midnight and vitality ran sluggish––Northrup became part of one of those curious mental experiences that go far to prove how narrow the boundary is that lies between the things we understand and those that are yet to be understood.
For some moments––or was it hours?––Northrup was not conscious of time or place; not even conscious of himself as 175 a body; he seemed to be a condition, over which a contest of emotions swept. He was not asleep. He recalled later, that he had kept his eyes on the fire; had once attended to it, casting on a heavy log that dimmed its ferocious ardour.
Where Jan-an had recently sat, struggling with her doubts and fears, Mary-Clare seemed to be. And yet it was not so much Mary-Clare, visually imagined, as that which had gone into the making of the woman.
The black, fierce night of her birth; her isolated up-bringing with a man whose mentality had overpowered his wisdom; the contact with Larry Rivers; the forced marriage and the determined effort to live up to a bargain made in the dark, endured in the dark. It came to Northrup, drifting as he was, that a man or woman can go through slime and torment and really escape harm. The old, fiery furnace legend was based on an eternal truth; that and the lions’ den! It put a new light on that peculiar quality of Mary-Clare. She had never been burnt or wounded––not the real woman of her. That explained the maddening thing about her––her aloofness. What would she be now when she stood alone? For she was going to stand alone! Then Northrup felt new sensations driving across that state which really was himself shorn of prejudice and limitations. His relation to Mary-Clare was changed!
There were primitive forces battling for expression in his lax hour. Setting the woman free from bondage––what for?