“There! Now you c’n all see from that!” triumphed Lois Daggett.
Mrs. Deacon Whittle and Mrs. Judge Fulsom gazed incredulously at Mrs. Solomon Black, then at one another.
Abby Daggett, the soft round of her beautiful, kind face flushed and tremulous, murmured: “Poor man—poor man!”
Mrs. Solomon Black with a masterly gesture headed the women toward her parlor, where a fire was burning in a splendidly nickeled stove full five feet high.
“Now,” said she; “we’ll talk this over, whatever it is.”
Chapter XXII.
A mile from town, where the angry wind could be seen at work tearing the purple rainclouds into rags and tatters, through which the hidden sun shot long rays of pale splendor, Wesley Elliot was walking rapidly, his head bent, his eyes fixed and absent.
He had just emerged from one of those crucial experiences of life, which, more than the turning of the earth upon its axis, serve to age a human being. For perhaps the first time in the brief span of his remembrance, he had scrutinized himself in the pitiless light of an intelligence higher than his own everyday consciousness; and the sight of that meaner self, striving to run to cover, had not been pleasant. Just why his late interview with Andrew Bolton should have precipitated this event, he could not possibly have explained to any one—and least of all to himself. He had begun, logically enough, with an illuminating review of the motives which led him into the ministry; they were a sorry lot, on the whole; but his subsequent ambitions appeared even worse. For the first time, he perceived his own consummate selfishness set over against the shining renunciations of his mother. Then, step by step, he followed his career in Brookville: his smug satisfaction in his own good looks; his shallow pride and vanity over the vapid insincerities he had perpetrated Sunday after Sunday in the shabby pulpit of the Brookville church; his Pharisaical relations with his people; his utter misunderstanding of their needs. All this proved poignant enough to force the big drops to his forehead.... There were other aspects of himself at which he scarcely dared look in his utter abasement of spirit; those dark hieroglyphics of the beast-self which appear on the whitest soul. He had supposed himself pure and saintly because, forsooth, he had concealed the arena of these primal passions beneath the surface of this outward life, chaining them there like leashed tigers in the dark.... Two faces of women appeared to be looking on, while he strove to unravel the snarl of his self-knowledge. Lydia’s unworldly face, wearing a faint nimbus of unimagined self-immolation, and Fanny’s—full of love and solicitude, the face which he had almost determined to forget.
He was going to Lydia. Every newly awakened instinct of his manhood bade him go.
She came to him at once, and without pretense of concealment began to speak of her father. She trembled a little as she asked: