When Vashti found the garden empty as last year’s nests she never paused, but turning fled up to the little garret cupola whose windowed sides gave a view for a long distance in every direction, and hardly had she climbed to this eyrie before she saw two figures in Mullein meadow.
That was enough.
Vashti did not wait to study the picture in detail. Gathering her skirts in her hand she sped down the stairs through the garden and down the road like a whirlwind. Her thwarted will shook her whole being as a birch trembles in the breeze. Mabella had dared! When she had smiled upon him! As Vashti ran down the road she promised herself that she would give both Sidney and Mabella a lesson. Mabella would be presuming to Lanty next! So Vashti soliloquised within her angry soul as she climbed the stone fence of Mullein meadow and crept noiselessly towards where she expected to find Mabella and Sidney. She advanced stealthily, paying all heed to caution, and after duly ensconcing herself behind a boulder which she knew commanded a view of the little hollow she looked—and saw.... and controlled herself sufficiently not to scream aloud in rage; but vitriolic anger seethed within her heart, and for the time denied outlet, burned and cankered and tortured the breast which contained it. The first desire of her dominant nature was to fling herself before them in a wild accession of rage, and open upon them the floodgates of speech, but Vashti Lansing was not without a heritage of self-control. Long ago when her ancestress had been on trial for witchery, cruel persuasion had been used to make her speak—in vain. The torment of the modern Vashti was greater and keener, inasmuch as it came from within; alas! we are told, it is that which defileth; every proud drop of blood in Vashti’s veins urged her to mocking speech; beneath the iron curb of her will she was mute, but the victory cost dear. So as Lilith, the snake-wife of Adam, may have lain in the shadows of Paradise watching the happiness of God-given Eve, Vashti Lansing stayed and watched sombrely, ominously, the joy of these two, and cursed them, vowing them evil, and promising the devil within her the glut of a full revenge—revenge for what?
Lanty had never given her cause to think he loved her, and Mabella had only veiled her love with shyness, not hidden it with guile—but—Vashti Lansing was supremely illogical. They had transgressed the unwritten statutes of her will. Did not that suffice to make them sinners above all others?—besides, like the poison which festers in the already wide wound, she realized in those moments of supreme mental activity that she loved Lanty, as women such as she love men, tigerishly, selfishly—Ah! they should suffer even as she suffered! She dropped her face in her hands, enduring the mortal agony of her baulked will, her misplaced, evil love, her bruised self-confidence, and shattering rage. And when she raised her head once more the scene had grown dark, the grassy stage whereon two mortals had lately mimed it in the guise of gods was empty, and she was alone.
She rose slowly to her feet wringing her hands in mute wrath. She looked around at the dreary field wherein she had endured such agony. Oh, that some yet more bitter blight than barrenness might fall upon it—some pest of noxious plants, some plague of poisonous serpents; oh, that she knew a curse potent enough to blast the grass upon which they had stood! But nature sanctifies herself; our curses are useless against her righteousness and rattle back upon our own heads like peas cast against a breast-plate of steel.
She entered the house calmly as was her wont. Within her heart was a Hades of rage; upon her brow the glamoured eyes of Sidney Martin saw the spectral gleam of the star of promise.
CHAPTER V.
Sally, the small bondmaiden of Mrs. Didymus, stood at the garden gate of the parsonage.
No smoke curled up from the parsonage chimney, for the kitchen fire was out, Sally being much too occupied with other affairs to attend to her work that day. Work, in Sally’s estimation, was the one superfluous thing in the world, and that she should be harassed with sweeping, and tormented with dish-washing, seemed to her an extraordinary and unjust dispensation. Sally had passed the first twelve years of her life in the slums, and her unregenerate soul yearned to return to the delights of dirt and idleness.