So he sat by himself at the back windows of a water-front saloon, and when he caught a glimpse of the water shining there low in its channels he would shut his lips tight.—Who could have thought that it would be the sea itself to throw in his path the woman who had set this blistering agony in his soul? There it lay like rolled glass; the black piles under the footbridge were prolonged to twice their length by their own shadows, so that the bridge seemed lifted enormously high out of water. Beyond the bridge the seine pockets of the mackerel men hung on the shrouds like black cobwebs, and the ships had a blighting look of funeral ships.—
He had mistrusted the sea. It was life; it was death; flow, slack, and ebb—and his pulse followed it.
Officials of the Customs House could testify that for better than a year, if he mentioned women at all, it was in a tone to convey that his fingers had been sorely burned in that flame and smarted still.
The second autumn, from that moment under the Preaching Tree, found him of the same opinion still. He trod the dust a very phantom, while little leaves of cardinal red spun past his nose like the ebbing heart's blood of full-bodied summer. The long leaves of the sumach, too, were like guilty fingers dipped in blood. But the little man paid no heed to the analogies which the seasons presented to his conscience in their dying. Though he thought often of his curse, he had not lifted it. But when he saw a cluster of checkerberry plums in spring gleam withered red against gray moss, on some stony upland, he stood still and pondered.
Then, on a night when the fall wind was at its mightiest, and shook the house on Meteor Island as if clods of turf had been hurled against it, he took down his Bible from its stand. At the first page to which he turned, his eye rested on the words, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?"
He bent close, his hand shook, and his blunt finger traced the remainder of that text which he and Cad Sills together had unwittingly erased from the Preaching Tree.
"No man, Lord."—"Neither do I damn thee: go, and sin no more."
He left the Bible standing open and ran out-of-doors.
The hemlock grove confronted him a mass of solid green. Night was coming on, as if with an ague, in a succession of coppery cold squalls which had not yet overtaken the dying west. In that quarter the sky was like a vast porch of crimson woodbine.
When this had sunk, night gave a forlorn and indistinguishable look to everything. A spark of ruddy light glowed deep in the valley. The rocking outlines of the hills were lost in rushing darkness. At his back sounded the pathetic clatter of a dead spruce against its living neighbor, bespeaking the deviltry of woodland demons.—It was the hour which makes all that man can do seem as nothing in the mournful darkness, causing his works to vanish and be as if they had not been.