A kind of panic seized Crosson. He backed out quickly and dragged Irene away with him in awkward desperation.
As her body came forth, his gun came too. He thought it had lain outside. He caught it and broke it at the breech, ejecting the two shells; one of them was empty. He threw it into the wreck and pocketed the other shell and tossed the gun under a stack of wreckage.
He was trying to revive Irene when her father and mother came back anxiously to say that she was not at home. Her mother dropped down at her side.
Crosson left Irene with her own people. He did not want to see her or hear her when she came back to this miserable world. He did not want her even to know what he knew.
III
Crosson had tried afterward to forget. It had been hard at first, but in time he had forgotten. He had gone to a theological school and learned to chide people for their complaints and to administer well-phrased anodynes. During his vacations he had avoided Irene. When he had been graduated he had been first pulpited in a far-off city.
Years afterward he had been invited to supply an empty pulpit in his home town. He had not succeeded with life. He lacked the flame or the luck or the tact—something. He had come back to the place he started from. He had renewed old acquaintances, laughed over the ancient jokes, and said he was sorry for those who had had misfortune. When he met Irene Straley he hardly recalled his love, except to smile at it as a boyish whim. He had forgotten the pangs of that as one forgets almost all his yester aches. He had forgotten the pains he had seen others suffer, even more easily than he forgot his own.
To-day his sermon on the triviality of bodily discomfort had flung Irene Straley back into the caldron of that old torment. She had made that silent protest against the iniquitous cruelty of his preachment. She had dragged him backward into the living presence of his past.
She had not forgotten. She had been faithful to Drury Boldin while he was working in a distant city. She was faithful to him still in that Farthest Country. She had the genius of remembrance.
These were Doctor Crosson's ulterior thoughts while he harangued his flock visibly and audibly. His thoughts had not needed the time their telling requires. They gave him back his scenes in pictures, not in words; in heartaches and heartbreaks and terrors and longings, not in limping syllables that mock the vision with their ineptitude.