The Eye of Dread

by Payne Erskine

But Julien was distraught and somber, in spite of brave words. He had not inherited Mary Ballard’s way of looking at things, nor his father-in-law’s buoyancy.

All that night Betty lay wakeful and thinking––thinking as she had many, many a time during the last three years, trying to make plans whereby she might adjust her 335 thoughts to a life of loneliness, as she had decided in her romantic heart was all she would take. How could there be anything else for her since that terrible night when Richard had come to her and confessed his guilt––his love and his renunciation! Was she not sharing it all with him wherever he might be, and whatever he was doing? Oh, where was he? Did he ever think of her and know she was always thinking of him? Did he know she prayed for him, and was the thought a comfort to him? Surely Peter was the happier of the two, for he was not a sorrowing criminal, wandering the earth, hiding and repenting. So all her thoughts went out to Richard, and no wonder she was a weary little wight at the end of the school day.

Four o’clock, and the children went hurrying away, all but Hilton Le Moyne, who lingered awhile at his desk, and then reluctantly departed, seeing Teacher did not look up from her papers except to give him a nod and a fugitive little smile of absent-minded courtesy. Left thus alone, Betty lifted the lid of her desk and put away the school register and the carefully marked papers to be given out the next day, and took from a small portfolio a packet of closely written sheets. These she untied and looked over, tossing them rapidly aside one after another until she found the one for which she searched.

It was a short poem, hastily written with lead pencil, and much crumpled and worn, as if it had been carried about. Now she straightened the torn edges and smoothed it out and began scanning the lines, counting off on her fingers the rhythmic beats; she copied the verses carefully on a fresh white sheet of paper and laid them aside; then, shoving the whole heap of written papers from her, she selected 336 another fresh sheet and began anew, writing and scanning and writing again.

Steadily she worked while an hour slipped by. A great bumblebee flew in at one window and boomed past her head and out at the other window, and a bluebird perched for an instant on the window ledge and was off again. She saw the bee and the bird and paused awhile, gazing with dreamy eyes through the high, uncurtained window at drifting clouds already taking on the tint of the declining sun; then she stretched her arms across her wide desk, and putting her head down on them, was soon fast asleep. Tired little Teacher!

The breeze freshened and tumbled her hair and fanned her flushed cheek, and it did more than that; for, as the drifting clouds betokened, the weather was changing, and now a gust of wind caught at her papers and took some of them out of the window, tossing and whirling them hither and thither. Some were carried along the wayside and lost utterly. One fluttered high over the tree tops and out across the meadow, and then suddenly ceased its flight and drifted slowly down like a dried leaf, past the face of a young man who sat on a stone, moodily gazing in the meadow brook. He reached out a long arm and caught it as it fluttered by, just in time to save it from annihilation in the water.

For a moment he held the scrap of paper absently between his fingers, then glancing down at it he spied faintly written, half-obliterated verses and read them; then, with awakened interest, he read them again, smoothing the torn bit of paper out on his knee. The place where he sat was well screened from the road by a huge basswood tree, which 337 spread great limbs quite across the stream, and swept both its banks with drooping branches and broad leaves. Now he held the scrap on his open palm and studied it closely and thoughtfully. It was the worn piece from which Betty had copied the verses.

“Oh, send me a thought on the winds that blow. On the wing of a bird send a thought to me; For the way is so long that I may not know, And there are no paths on the troubled sea. “Out of the darkness I saw you go,–– Into the shadows where sorrows be,–– Wounded and bleeding, and sad and slow,–– Into the darkness away from me. “Out of my life and into the night, But never out of my heart, my own. Into the darkness out of the light, Bleeding and wounded, and walking alone.”

Here the words were quite erased and scratched over, and the pathetic bit of paper looked as if it had been tear-stained. Carefully and smoothly he laid it in his long bill book. The book was large and plethoric with bank notes, and there beside them lay the little scrap of paper, worn and soiled, yet tear washed, and as the young man touched it tenderly he smiled and thought that in it was a wealth of something no bank note could buy. With a touch of sentiment unsuspected by himself, he felt it too sacred a thing to be touched by them, and he smoothed it again and laid it in a compartment by itself.

Then he rose, and sauntered across the meadow to the country road, and down it past the schoolhouse standing on its own small rise of ground with the door still wide open, and its shadow, cast by the rays of the now setting sun 338 stretched long across the playground. The young man passed it, paused, turned back, and entered. There at her desk Betty still slept, and as he stepped softly forward and looked down on her she stirred slightly and drew a long breath, but slept on.