She looked with hot, sombre eyes at Gilead Balm. It was the home she had always known and she loved it; it was home,—yes, it was home; but it was not so pleasant at home just now. March—and the Colonel had withdrawn her from Eglantine, ordered her home, the first of January! January, February, a part of March—and her grandfather still eaten with a cold anger every time he looked at her, and her grandmother, outraged at her suddenly manifested likeness to Maria and Maria's "ways," almost as bad! Aunt Serena gave her no sympathy; Aunt Serena had become almost violent on the subject. If you were going to rebel and disobey, Aunt Serena told her, if you were going to be forward and almost fast, and rebel and disobey, you needn't look for any sympathy from her! Colonel Ashendyne had been explicit enough back in January. "When you send about his business that second-rate person you've chosen to entangle yourself with, then and not till then will you be 'Gipsy' again to me!"
Hagar put out her arms to the wind. "I want to go away! I want to go away! I'm tired of it all—tired of living here—"
The wind blew past her with its long cry; then it suddenly sank, and there came almost a half-hour of bright calm, warm stillness, astral gold. Hagar sat down between the roots of the cucumber tree and took her head within her arms. By degrees, in the sunshine, emotion subsided; she began to think and dream. Her mind sent the shuttle far and fast, it touched here and touched there, and in the course of its weaving it touched Eglantine, touched and quit and touched again. Laydon was still at Eglantine. He had been a very satisfactory Professor of Belles-Lettres; Mrs. LeGrand really did not know where, in mid-season, to find such another. He had behaved wretchedly, but the mischief was done, and there was—on consideration—no need to tell the world about it, no especial need, indeed, of proclaiming it at Eglantine or to Eglantine patrons at large. He was not—Mrs. LeGrand did him that justice—he was not at all a "fast" man or likely to give further trouble upon this line. And he was a good teacher, a good talker, in demand for lectures on cultural subjects before local literary societies, popular and pleasing, a creditable figure among the Eglantine faculty. Much of this matter was probably Hagar's fault. She had made eyes at him, little fool! When the Colonel declared his determination,—with no reflections on Eglantine, my dear friend!—to bring to an end his granddaughter's formal education, and to take her back to Gilead Balm where this infatuation would soon disappear,—Mrs. LeGrand saw daylight. She had an interview with Colonel Ashendyne. He was profoundly contemptuous of what Mr. Laydon did for a living or where he did it, of whom he taught or what he taught, so long as there was distance between him and an Ashendyne. "You know—you know, my dear friend, that I have always had in mind Ralph Coltsworth!" She had an interview—concert pitch—with Laydon. She had a smooth, quiet talk with her teachers. She mentioned casually, to one after another of the girls, that Mrs. Ashendyne at Gilead Balm was not as young as she had been, nor as strong, and that Colonel Ashendyne thought that Hagar should be at home with her grandmother. She, Mrs. LeGrand, regretted it, but every girl's duty to her family was paramount. They would miss Hagar sadly,—she was a dear girl and a clever girl,—but it seemed right that she should go. Hagar went and Laydon stayed, and without a word from any principal in the affair, every girl at Eglantine knew that Mr. Laydon had kissed Hagar, and that Hagar had said that she would love him forever, and that Colonel Ashendyne was very angry, and was probably keeping Hagar on bread and water at that instant, and that it was all very romantic.... And then at Eglantine examinations came on, and dreams of Easter holiday, and after that of Commencement, and Mr. Laydon taught with an entire correctness and an impassive attitude toward all young ladies; and Miss Bedford, who had been very bitter at first and had said things, grew amiable again and reopened her Browning. The ripple smoothed out as all things smoothed out at Eglantine. The place resumed its pristine "sweetness." It was believed among the girls that Mr. Laydon and Hagar "corresponded," but it was not certainly known. Mr. Laydon wrapped himself in dignity as in a mantle. As for Hagar, she had always been rather far away.
Up on the ridge to-day, Hagar's mind dwelt somewhat on Eglantine, but not overmuch. It was not precisely Eglantine that she was missing. Was she missing Laydon? Certainly, at this period, she would have answered that she was—though, to be perfectly truthful, she might have added, "But I do not think of that all the time—not nearly all the time." She was unhappy, and on occasions her fancy brooded over that night in the Eglantine parlour when he read of love, and the flames became jewelled and alive, and she saw the turret on the plain, "by the caper overrooted, by the gourd overscored," and suddenly a warmth and light wrapped them both. The warmth and light certainly still dwelt over that scene and that moment. To a lesser extent it abided over and around the next morning, the west porch, the syringa alley. Very strangely, as she was dimly aware, it stretched only thinly over the following days, over even the night of "Romeo and Juliet." There was there a mixed and wavering light, changing, for the hour that immediately followed,—the hour when she faced her grandfather, and he spoke with knives as he was able to do, when he laid his hands upon her and said untrue and unjust things to Laydon,—into an angry glow. That hour was bright and hot like a ruby. How much was love, and how much outraged pride and a burning sense of wrong, she was not skilled to know, nor how much was actual chivalric defence of her partner in iniquity.... The parting interview, when she and Laydon, having stood upon their rights, obtained a strange half-hour in the Eglantine parlour—strange and stiff, with "Of course, if I love you, I'll be faithful," repeated on her part some five times, with, on his part, Byronic fervour, volcanic utterances. Had he not gone over them to himself afterwards, in his homely, cheerfully commonplace room in the brown cottage outside the Eglantine grounds? They had been fine; from the point of view of Belles-Lettres they could not have been bettered. He felt a glow as he recognized that fact, followed by a mental shot at the great Seat of Learning where he wished to be. "By George! that's the place I'm fitted for! The man they've got isn't in the same class—".... The parting interview—to the girl on the ridge a cloud seemed to hang over that, a cloud that was here and there rose-flushed, but just as often fading into grey. Hagar drove her thoughts back to the first evening and the jewelled fire; that was a clear, fair memory, innocent, rich and sincere. The others had, so strangely, a certain pain and dulness.
She had a sturdy power of reaction against the melancholy and the painful, and as to-day she could not, somehow, fix her mind unswervingly upon the one clear hour, and the others perplexed and hurt, her mind at last turned with decision from any contemplation whatsoever of the round of events which lay behind her presence here, in March, upon the ridge behind Gilead Balm. Rising, she left the cucumber tree and walked along the crest of the ridge. The wind was not blowing now, the sunshine was very golden, the little leaves were springing. She crossed the ribbon-like plateau to its northern edge, and stood, looking down that slope. It was somewhat heavily wooded, and in shadow. It fell steeply to a handsbreadth of sward, a purling streamlet, sunken boulders, a wide thicket and a wood beyond. Hagar, leaning against a young beech, gazed down the shadowed stillness. Her eyebrows lifted at their inner ends, lines came into her forehead, wistful markings about her lips. Sometimes when she knew that she was quite alone she spoke aloud to her self. She did this now. "I haven't been here since that day it happened.... Six years.... I wonder if he ran away again, or if he stayed there to the end. I wonder where he is now. Six years...."
The wind rose and blew fiercely, rattling in the thicket and bending every tree; then it sank again. Hagar leaned against the trunk of the beech and thought and thought. As a child she had been speculative, everywhere and all the time; with youth had come dreams and imaginations, pushing the older intense querying aside. Now of a sudden a leaf was turned. She dreamed and imagined still, but the thinker within her rose a step, gained a foot on the infinite, mounting stair. Hagar began to brood upon the state of the world. "Black and white stripes like a zebra.... How petty to clothe a man—a boy he was then—like that, mark him and brand him, until through life he sees himself striped black and white like a zebra—on his dying bed, maybe, sees himself like that! Vindictive. And the world sees him, too, like that, grotesque and mean and awful, and it cannot cleanse his image in its mind. It is foolish."
The wind roared again up and down the ridge. Hagar shivered and began to move toward the warmer side; then halted, turned, and came back to the beech. "I'll not go away until the sun comes from under that cloud and the wind drops. It's like leaving him alone in the thicket down there, in the cold and shadow." She waited until the sun came out and the wind dropped, then took her hand from the beech tree and went away. Leaving the ridge, she came to the overseer's house, hesitated a moment, then went and knocked at the kitchen door.
"Come in!" called Mrs. Green, who was sitting by the kitchen table, in the patch of sunlight before the window, sewing together strips of bright cloth and winding them into balls for a rag carpet. "You, Hagar? Come right in! Well, March is surely going out like a lion!"
"It's so windy that the clouds are running like sheep," said Hagar. She took a small, split-bottom rocking-chair, drew it near Mrs. Green, and began to wind carpet rags. "Red and blue and grey—it's going to be a beautiful carpet! Have you heard from Thomasine?"