In many of the rocks on the farm the roots of trees had made little rifts and squeezed and squirmed and grown until they split granite asunder. What heart could withstand the relentless pressure, from the irresistible gimleting of a secret?
Once the truth was uttered, it could no more be recalled than the dead itself. It was cruelly easy in this world to do, to say, to think; and hideously impossible to undo, unsay, unthink. One could only add repentance and remorse to guilt or carelessness.
Repentance and remorse were dangerous, too, to the soul, for one could repent a good deed, a mercy, an abstention as easily as evil. He found now in his conscience nothing but regret that he had let that filthy serpent crawl away. The copperhead had struck and he had merely bruised it and left it alive with all its venom, and the forked tongue and hissing of gossip.
In this room he had sorely repented two deeds of pity: sparing Chalender’s life and Jud Lasher’s. What a poltroon thing pity was, after all!
The next day he rode over to White Plains and found a letter from Patty among his mail. He read it on the way home, letting the reins lie in the mane of the horse while he conned the pages. They were dashed off in a mood of girlish hilarity. New York was a fountain of renewing youth to her. It had grown enormously, she said, since she left it a few months ago. The railroad journey was a sensational adventure. Like most of the other passengers, she had been fairly choked with smoke and riddled with cinders and one of them had stuck in her eye a long while. But New York with even half an eye was heaven.
She hoped that he would come soon. She would have the house ready for him in a few days. St. John’s Park that had been way uptown when they moved in was already slipping downtown. It was mighty pretty, though, and the water when it came would make it a paradise of convenience. She reminded him to keep the children off the highway and away from those miserable Lashers.
Her solemn edicts were as girlishly innocent as her gayeties. It made bitter reading, that warning—that ex post facto warning—against the Lashers. Whatever happened she must never know this blighting truth.
In a few days Immy was playing in the yard again. She seemed to have forgotten her experience as she forgot the nightmares that sometimes woke her screaming from sleep. But now and then she would cast upon her father a look of amazement. In her games with Keith she shrieked more easily in a wilder alarm. Her shrieks stabbed RoBards and made him dread that the experience had worked some permanent injury in the fabric of the child’s soul.
All the ignorance that had been wrapped about her youth for her protection was gone now. The blindfold had been snatched from her eyes. The questions that she had been rebuked for asking, were brutally answered and yet left unanswered. The beauty, the mystery, the holiness of innocence had been torn like the rent veil in the temple, and only the uglier knowledge vouchsafed.
And a stain had been cast upon her indelibly. She would be regarded with pity and yet with horror forever. She was branded with all the curses of abominable sin, though she had had no choice, no share, no understanding of it.