“Lie down, Sidney,” she said, “and have a little rest. You are troubling yourself needlessly. Dole is full of freakish people. Temperance has quarrelled with all the women about something and they may have rushed off to avoid some dispute. Your flock think you are perfect. Sleep, Sidney, and forget these troubles. You are too sensitive.” He suffered himself to be led to the green leather couch and stretched himself upon it wearily. She bent above him, passing her strong magnetic hands across his brow, looking at him with almost pitiful eyes. Her pity was that of a vivisector who dares sympathize with the dumb creature he tortures.
Sidney looked up at her between the passes of her waving hands. For an instant his face was glorified, and he saw her again as he had seen her that first day on the old porch of the Lansing house, with her fingers shining like ivory in the sun, and her noble head set like a cameo upon the green background of wild cucumber vine which draped the porch.
He saw her thus, his first, last love, and then closed his eyes and floated forth upon the cloud of golden memory into the dreamless realm of a hypnotic sleep with her voice whispering, it seemed within his very soul, saying “Sleep and forget, sleep and forget.”
And he slept.
It was dusk. Vashti Lansing let herself out of the parsonage, for a wild hour was coming upon her, the proud, impatient despairing spirit was clamouring at her lips for utterance, and she felt as perhaps every married woman feels sometimes that her home afforded her no sanctuary safe from her husband’s intrusion.
And so softly closing the door she fled out into the night, and as her agitation increased, the moonless night deepened, and lighted only by a few wan stars she fled along the country road, her turmoil of spirit translated into physical energy. And presently she found herself opposite the gaunt boulders of Mullein meadow. Its hopelessness suited her mood. She entered it, and wandering amid its dreary boulders she crucified herself with memories.
As a stoic who longs to know the extent of his endurance she forced herself to pass where she had trodden through the furnace, but she did not linger, for deny the fact as she might, Vashti Lansing was no longer the superbly strong woman she had been.
As the “elm tree dies in secret from the core,” so Vashti Lansing’s strength had been sapped unseen.
She turned dizzily away from the circle of boulders and wandered on, away to the other end of Mullein meadow, and there sank down upon a little knoll known far and near as Witches’ Hill, for it was here, so tradition said, that the unholy fires had been lit to torture the life out of cross-grained old women, with perhaps no worse tempers than their judges, but a poorer art in concealing them. It was because of these executions that Mullein meadow was cursed with barrenness, so said the old story, but Dole, concerned with the practical things of food and raiment, did not trouble its head about old tales, only the school children kept the story alive, daring each other to cross Mullein meadow at twilight, or to bring back a stone from Witches’ Hill, for there was a strange outcropping of stone here different from any in the district.
Vashti sat beneath the wan sky solitary upon one of these stones. She knew well the reputation of the place, but felt a perverse delight in carrying her tortured heart to the spot where the old Vashti had suffered.