“Yes,” said Mabella sleepily. “I think I knocked something over with my elbow and the noise woke me up.”
“Are you all right, Vashti?”
“Yes, what is it?” answered Vashti.
“Nothin’—thought I heard a noise.”
For hours Vashti Lansing lay and trembled with the only fear she knew; the fear of herself. How near she had been to terrible crime, only she and Omnipotence could know. She reflected upon consequences and told herself that never again would she give herself such an opportunity. At last she sank to rest, to be tormented till dawn by a strange vision.
It seemed to her she stood again in Mullein meadow, within the circle of boulders, and that slowly, slowly they closed in upon her; closer and closer they came, narrowing about her with gradual but horrible certainty, and at last they touched her and held her tight, shackling her hand and foot so that she could not move a muscle, but they did not kill her; and whilst she was thus held all Dole defiled before her; the villagers pointed at her with scornful fingers and passed whispering on; her mother, who had long been dead, passed with her father, but they did not look at her, nor seem to know she was there, nor did old Mr. and Mrs. Didymus who presently joined her father and mother. Then the scene grew brighter and she saw Temperance and Nathan together; they shook their heads, looking at her sadly but coldly; then a sweeter radiance flooded the view upon which she looked, and Mabella and Lanty with their little children about them drew nigh her, and they spoke kindly words to her, and put a shade over her head to keep off the sun’s heat, and raised a cup to her lips, and one of their children came and held up a child’s haphazard bouquet to her nostrils that she might smell the flowers. She tried to repulse these kindnesses; she tried to drive Mabella and Lanty away with evil words, but the stones pressed too tightly upon her to admit of speech, and while she writhed thus impotently, she looked far away where one wandered alone; there were butterflies and birds about him, and flowers springing about his feet, and he wore a look of calm ineffable happiness, and, yet, it was not the same happiness as shone upon the faces of Lanty and Mabella which lighted the eyes of this visioned Sidney. But in her dream Vashti did not dwell long upon this, her thoughts reverting to the paralyzing prison which encompassed her; and she fought, and struggled, and strove, yet she could not move those terrible stones, and casting her eyes down upon herself, it gradually dawned upon her that she could not even struggle. The terrible wrenches and efforts she had made were but imaginary, so tightly was she held that she could not so much as twitch a finger. Thus the hours passed with her.
Mabella slept sweetly and healthfully, so rapt in love that even the baleful influence bending over her so terribly in the night had had no power to disturb her rest, although the gaze of even a friendly pair of eyes so often murders sleep. Sidney slept also, and high above the pale wastes of Mullein meadow, the star of promise still shone, unrecking of the presumptuous human heart which had dared to dream its silvery splendour a pennon of hope.