Her father and Eunice were away from home for the day—probably for the night also, and she had her reasons for preferring the solitude of the woods, or a retreat among the crags of Old Windbeam, to a prolonged interview with Orrin Wyllys.
Did I say, "preferred"? Does not the opium-eater, in his lucid intervals, prefer thirst and languor and pain to the drug for which his diseased appetite cries out as the dying for breath, and the fever-scorched for water? Prefer it with mind and conscience, if not with flesh and will? Jessie Kirke's will lived yet, and it had borne her beyond the reach of temptation and kept her there. But it did not hinder her from picturing Orrin pacing the portico, or, sitting in the parlor, awaiting her while she hid herself and her wretchedness among the willows. She had but to go back by the way she had come, and hours of blissful companionship would be hers; full draughts of enjoyment such as those which had intoxicated the unwary girl who, last winter, had believed that she might drink and be blameless. His eyes would kindle into the magic gleam that enervated resolution and let loose a flood of vague, delicious fancies upon her brain; his voice melt into the modulations that enchained the ear like pathetic music. Under the spell of his consummate address she would believe, for the moment, or the hour, or the day he spent with her, all that he said or looked, although dimly conscious, the while, that she would despise herself as a weak, guilty fool for the temporary faith, through weeks and months afterward.
As she did now! She was wrung by self-contempt for nursing these imaginations, yet dallied with them—sipped shudderingly, yet with avidity, of their dangerous sweetness.
"I have tried very hard!" she moaned again.
Tried to hold fast to her trust in her betrothed after the cruel shock it had sustained from Hester Sanford's story, for she still believed that it was firm and absolute up to that hour; ignored persistently the fact that other influences had previously been at work sapping her confidence in the attachment of one who, his nearest of kin reluctantly admitted, was a man of granite, virtuously severe to the frailties of others, because he was himself prudent, sage, and incorruptible by such bribes as most men found potent—love, and the hope and opportunity of making the beloved one happy. Not one word of this had Wyllys ever uttered. He always spoke of Roy with seriousness and respect, confessing voluntarily, time and again, his own moral and intellectual inferiority to his cousin, and scrupulously keeping her betrothment before Jessie's mind. Whatever might have been her lapses from loyalty, she could not deny that in this oft-repeated acknowledgment of her paramount obligation to her affianced husband, Orrin had been honorable to punctiliousness. She had not yet come to see that he had also been ingenious in pressing invisible shackles into her soul; in reminding her perpetually that she was no longer a free agent. The girl had chafed under the process, without knowing that she did so, and why. Her brotherly friend, who had seen a blooded horse, although docile by nature and well broken in, fret and grow restive under an over-tight check-rein, may have known, better than she, what he was about.
She was still uncertain how much or how little truth there was in the heiress' tale. She had contrived to see her but seldom after the scene in the billiard-room, and in this she was ably seconded by Miss Sanford when the news of "that Miss Kirke's" engagement to Professor Fordham was circulated in Hamilton circles. Jessie did not try to analyze the impulse that bade her announce the relation she bore to Roy at the very time when her doubts of him were at their height. Perhaps she felt the need of a safeguard for herself; or her conscience may have rebuked her that she had not defended him—right or wrong—when attacked; or the suspicion of his unworthiness stimulated her to a strained generosity, a resolve to leave undone no part of the duty she owed, while she was under contract to him. It had been long since her latest mention of the matter to Wyllys. He had replied to her queries by an injunction to continued confidence in Roy's integrity, which was construed by her into a charitable evasion. He promised again and solemnly to push his investigations as occasion might offer, but she believed that he was afraid to keep his word. He would preserve intact his own love and esteem for the cousin he professed to revere, and blindly declined to undertake the examination of a record he more than feared contained entries that would lower his opinion of his hero, and damage the latter's character irretrievably with herself.
Given this lever of unappeased distrust in, and latent resentment toward him, to whom her allegiance was due, and a less adroit diplomat than Orrin Wyllys might have so weakened the defences of her love and constancy as to make her question whether surrender were not unavoidable—even desirable. She was "tired," poor child! dismayed that her labor in "deep mid-ocean" was so tedious and severe, longing for rest in whatever port her worn heart might make.
"I shall be tamed by the time you come home," she had said, 'twixt tears and smiles, to Roy at their parting. "Quite tame and old!"
"And I am!" she thought, the jest recurring to her now. "Only life has also grown tame, and the world old and gray!"
She had swung her hat upon her arm, and pushing back her hair with the palms that supported her forehead, that the wind from the water might cool her beating temples, she rested her listless weight upon the frail railing. The woven twigs, once supple, were dry and rotten under the bark, and swayed outward with a sharp crack—a warning that came too late to save her. She caught, in falling, at the shattered panels left standing, and dragged only a handful of broken sticks with her into the creek. Coming to the surface after the plunge, she threw her grasping, struggling hands widely abroad, succeeded in seizing one of the upright supports of the bridge, and clung to it. Her head and shoulders were out of water. She was not actually drowning. In the strength imparted by this consciousness, she drew a long breath, and called for help.