A faint echo came back from the hills. The rest of the shout was lost in the spreading meadows, or overpowered by the commingled sounds that were the voice of the early autumn day.
She heard them more distinctly than when she had stood upon the bridge; the beat of the mill-wheel, the rattle and rumble of the farm-wagons, even the tread of the teams upon the oaken flooring; the now distant whistle of the quail, and, close beside her, the lapping of the creek among the sedges.
She weighed her chances of speedy release from her unpleasant and dangerous situation before she raised another outcry. The stream was the feeder of the mill-pond, and was made deeper and more sluggish by the dam, less than half a mile farther down. She remembered to have heard that the depth just under the bridge was about ten feet. It might as well be a hundred if she were to relinquish her hold. She could do nothing but cling and wait until her calls should bring rescue, or some chance passenger espy her. This was an unfrequented by-way, and it might be many hours before assistance came to her in the latter form. As to the other, the Parsonage was the nearest dwelling. The mill was no farther off, but the united shriek of twenty drowning women could not be heard above the clatter of the machinery. Patsey was alone in the kitchen, her whole soul in her semi-weekly baking, and deaf to all out-door noises excepting those from the poultry-yard. There was no one else in the house, unless Orrin had arrived. Jessie believed that she tasted the bitterness of death, as she imagined him, expectant of her coming, yet thoughtless of evil as the reason of her delay, taking a few restless turns upon the portico; then, wandering into the parlor, and standing, as he often did, for several minutes together, gazing at the picture of the girl at the wishing-well; opening the piano and running over some remembered air, or improvising dreamy, wistful strains, with absent thoughts, and eyes fixed upon vacancy.
And she was here! nearing the gates that were to shut down between them forever.
She called again—a shrill scream that scared the birds from their perches on the willow and birch boughs, and awoke a wailing echo among the mountains. Then all was quiet, save for the mill, the fainter roll of heavy wheels, and, louder than either, the lap! lap! lap! of the waves upon the grassy bank. How deadly cold the water was! And she became sensible now of an increasing weight drawing her downward—the strain of her saturated garments upon the arms wound about the rough pole which stood between her and death. There was a current, also, to be resisted, placid as the mirror had seemed from above, and her sinews were aching already. Her whole body would be numb presently—her clutch be relaxed by cold and the prostration of the nervous and muscular system.
She had decried life as tame, and the world as unlovely. She found them, in this fearfully honest hour, too dear and beautiful to leave thus suddenly. She recollected, even in this season of peril and dread, the oft-repeated story that one in the act of drowning recalls, in a flash of memory, every event of his past existence, however remote and minute; reasoned within herself that this must be an old wives' fable, since she, on the brink of eternity, had but one overmastering idea—how to avert impending dissolution. Her father, Eunice, Roy, and Orrin, were all in her mind by turns, but there was no quickening of affection now that she might be leaving them to return no more. They were, in comparison with the terrible fact of her present danger, but misty and far-off abstractions—faded portraits in her mental gallery, hardly deserving a glance. She dwelt, in agony, upon the circumstances that the stream was becoming like ice to her limbs, and the pain in her arms intense, while her soaked clothing and the current were sucking her downward. When the last remnant of her strength should fail, would she be drowned by the cruel waters where she had fallen in, or borne, conscious, and writhing in the throes of suffocation, over the dam, to be mangled by the rocks below the fall?
The horror of the last fancy drew from her another shriek. The echo taunted her by its feeble mimickry; the dull boom of the mill-wheel, the teamster's shout to his oxen, had the same meaning, and the lapping of the water was that of a fierce destroyer, hungering for his prey.
Meanwhile, the visitor at the Parsonage had been through the round Jessie had sketched for him in her tortured imagination; had paced the porch until he was weary of the solitary turns; surveyed the portrait to his heart's content, regretting, in his æsthetic mind, that the original had toned down to the level of commonplace refinement, and had played a pensive "thought" on the piano.
This performance brought in Patsey.
"Dick Van Brunt was by the gate just now, Mr. Wyllys, and he said as how he seen Miss Jessie going down toward the crick, nigh upon an hour ago. You mought see something of her if you was to walk that way."