Say and Seal, Volume I

by Susan Warner; Anna Bartlett Warner

She planted herself for an instant before him and looked in his face, with eyes of quiet but most eloquent beseeching.

"No"—he repeated,—"you must go on and fear nothing. Child—'there is no restraint to the Lord, to save by many or by few.'"

She did not answer, even by the little shake of the head which sometimes with her stood in place of words. She turned, went swiftly forward, with a straight, even, unslackening pace, which did not falter nor stop for a long, long piece of the way; how long it was by the mind's measurement it would be hard to tell. It was one breathless sense of pain and fear; of which moonlight and shadows and the points of the way all made part and were woven in together. Her ears were tingling for that sound; her eyes only measured unconsciously the distances and told off the waymarks. Down the little pitch of the road where that to Barley point forked off; then by a space of clear fences where hedgerows were not, and a barn or two rose up in the moonlight; through gates where the post shadows were black and deep, by the skirting bushes that now and then gathered about the rails. She walked as fast as she could and keep her strength. That was unconsciously measured too. It had seemed to her, in her agony of pleading before the commencing of this strange walk, that it was impossible she should do it. She was doing it now, under a force of will that she had not been able to withstand; and her mind was subdued and strained beyond the power of thinking. Her very walking seemed to her mechanical; intensely alive as her senses were all the time. There was a transient relief at coming into the neighbourhood of a house, and a drear feeling of desolation and increased danger as she left it behind her; but her pace neither faltered nor flagged. She looked round sometimes, but never paused for that. Before the more thickly settled part of the village was reached her step grew a little slower, probably from the sheer necessity of failing strength; but steady it was, at whatever rate of travel. When at last they turned the sandy corner into the broad street or main way of the village, where houses and gardens often broke the range of hedgeway or fence, and lights spoke to lights in the neighbouring windows, Faith stopped and stood leaning against the fence. In another moment she was drawn away from that to a better support.

"Are you faint?" Mr. Linden said.

Her "no" was faint, but the answer was true for all the rest of her.

He drew her hand within his arm, and went on silently; but how glad he was to see her home, Faith might guess from the way she was half carried up the steps and into the hall, and the door shut and locked behind her. After the same fashion she was taken into the sitting-room and placed in the easy chair, and her wrappers unfastened and taken off with very gentle and quick hands. She offered almost as little help as hindrance, and her head sank immediately.

He stood by her, and repeated his question about faintness.

"O no, sir—I'm not faint. It's nothing," Faith said, but as if her very voice was exhausted. And crossing her arms upon the table, close to which the easy chair stood, she laid her head down upon them. Her mother might well say she had a baby face. It looked so them.

Mr. Linden's next move was to get a glass of wine, and with gentle force and persuasion to make her swallow it; that done, he stood leaning upon the back of her chair, silently, but with a very, very grave face.

She kept her position, scarcely stirring, for some length of time, except that after a while she hid her face in her hands. And sitting so, at last she spoke, in a troubled tone.