Lettice Hollidew! little fool; but what was that beyond her, blacker than night?
He stirred, sat up sharply, his eyes dazzled by a blaze of intolerable brilliancy. It was the sun, a full two hours above the horizon. He had slept through the night. His muscles were cramped, his neck ached intolerably. He rose with a painful effort and something fell to the floor. It was a rose, wilted, its fragrance fled. He realized that Lettice had laid it on his knee, last night, when the bud had been fresh. He had slept while she stood above him, while the rose had faded. On the step the fish lay, no longer brightly colored, in a dull, stiff heap. The house was still; through the open door the sun fell on a strip of rag rug. He turned and hurried down the steps, unlatched the gate, and almost ran across the fields to the cover of a wood, fleeing from an unsupportably humiliating vision.
XXV
He made his way to where Greenstream village lay somnolent beneath the refulgent day. The chairs before the office of the Bugle were unoccupied, from within came the monotonous, sliding rattle of the small footpress. Gordon sat absently revolving the possibilities held out by the near future. Hay, he knew was still being made in the valley, but the prospect of long, arduous, days in the open fields, in the hot, dry chaff of the sere grass, was forbidding. He might take his gun and a few personal necessities and disappear into such wild as yet remained, contracting steadily before the inexorable, smooth advance of civilization. He was aware that he could manage a degree of comfort, adequate food. But the thoughtless resiliency of sheer youth had deserted him, the desire for mere, picturesque adventure had fled during the past, comfortable years. He dismissed contemptuously the possibility of clerking in a local store. There was that still in the Makimmon blood which balked at measuring ribbands, selling calico to captious women.
The large, suave figure of the Universalist minister, in grey alpaca coat and black trousers, approached leisurely over the street, and stopped before Gordon. The minister had a conspicuously well-fed paunch, his smooth face expressed placid self-approval, his tones never for a moment lost the unctuous echo of the pulpiteer.
“You have not worshipped with us lately,” he observed. “Remiss, remiss. Our services have been stirring—three souls redeemed from everlasting torment at the Wednesday meeting, two adults and a child sealed to Christ on Sunday.”
“I’ll drop in,” Gordon told him pacifically.
“A casual phrase to apply to the Mansion of the Son,” the minister observed, “more humility would become you.... God, I pray Thee that Thy fire descend upon this unhappy man and consume utterly away his carnal envelope. What are you doing?” he demanded abruptly of Gordon.