The shafts of her merciless scorn pierced the armor of the young man's cool calmness like arrows barbed with fire. It seemed to him for an instant as though flame suddenly wrapped him from head to foot. He felt literally scorched by a burning sense of shame, although, dazed and bewildered, he could not yet see whence it came. The blood rushed into his face, into his head; his eyes fell; he could not keep them on his grandmother's mocking, scornful face.
Old lady Gordon's fiery gaze did not fall, but it softened. A strange look, one which was hard to read, came to replace the expression of contemptuous anger. There was still some scorn in it, yet the scorn was curiously mingled with vanity.
"Well, after all, you are more like me than you're like the men of the family," she said abruptly, with a sudden return to her usual manner.
Lynn could not speak; he could not look at her. He silently bent down and took up his hat, which had dropped from his nerveless grasp, and with bowed head he went silently out into the shielding dusk.
XXV
THE REVELATION OF THE TRUTH
The first wound received by true self-respect is always a terrible thing. And the truer the self-esteem and the better founded, the more the slightest blow must bruise it. The deepest stabbing of the derelict can never hurt so much or be so hard to heal. It may indeed be doubted whether a touch on the real quick of a fine sense of honor ever entirely heals.
A man coarser and duller than Lynn Gordon was, less high-minded, less essentially honorable, could not have suffered as he was suffering when he went out that night into the dusky peace of the drowsing village. Yet he could hardly tell at first whence came the blow which had wounded him so deeply. The suddenness of the arraignment had dazed him; the violence of the attack had stunned him; so that he was conscious mainly of a strange bewilderment of pain and humiliation, as though he had been struck down in the dark.
He went through the gate as if walking in a distressful dream, and turned toward the silver poplars, as he had turned at that time of the evening for many weeks, but turning through sheer force of habit, scarcely knowing whither he went. It was not yet quite nightfall; the starlight was just beginning to meet the twilight, only commencing to arch vast violet spaces high above the dim trees on the far-folded hills. The silvery mists, ever lurking among the fringing willows of the stream murmuring through the meadows, were already rising to cloud the lowlands with fleecy whiteness, radiantly starred with fireflies. The few languid sounds of living heard in the day, now had all passed away before the coming of night. Only the plaintive song of the white cricket came from the misty distance; only the lonely chime of the brown cricket rang from the near-by grass; only the chilling prophecy of the katydid's cry shrilled through the peaceful silence of the warm, fragrant gloaming.