“Elithe,” he said, “Elithe,” in a tone of voice which sent the hot blood in waves of crimson to her face. Then, remembering Clarice and the cell and the convict’s dress, he dropped her hands and only added: “Go now and leave me. I am better alone.”
CHAPTER XLI.
TOM, YOU DID IT!
This was what Elithe said to Tom, sitting in the Baptist Tabernacle just where she sat when he came asking her to help him liberate Paul, and where he now came to tell her of Paul’s fixed determination to go back, as he termed it. No arguments or entreaties had been of any avail to deter him from his purpose. Anything was preferable to the life he was living, he said, and when the court which was to try the firebugs was in session he should give himself up, trusting Providence for the result. From the moment when this was settled Tom appeared like a new man, and his cheery whistle, which had not been heard since Paul’s arrest, sounded in the stables and yard again as he busied himself with his work. The second day after Paul’s decision he put on the coat and hat he had not worn since the Sunday when Jack was shot and started for a walk in the woods. It was late November, and the dead leaves rustled under his feet with a dreary sound which awoke a mournful feeling in his heart.
“It makes me sorry like to think I shan’t be walking here much longer, but I’m going to do it,” he said, just as he saw Elithe sitting in the Tabernacle in the distance.
She did not see him till he was close to her, and then she started as she had done before with a thought that it was Paul.
“It’s his coat and hat, or they were once,” Tom said, “and in ’em I b’lieve I look so much like him that in a fading light I might easily be mistaken for him, if he had been seen and spoken to a few minutes before. I might be shootin’ at some animal, you know,—a rabbit, or woodchuck. Do you see?”
He was looking at Elithe, in whose mind a whirlwind of emotions were contending with wild suspicions, which culminated at last in her springing up and with her finger pointed towards him saying: “Tom you did it!”
Tom answered, “I did,” and listened while she heaped upon him the most scathing scorn for his cowardice and wickedness in letting another suffer in his stead.
“And you would have seen him sent to prison, perhaps to death, and never spoken,” she said, “Oh, Tom, I have thought you so good and true, and all the time you were hiding your own sin. I’m going to town as fast as I can to tell it.”
She was hurrying away when Tom took hold of her arm and made her sit down again.