"Here, Bill," growled he, "where's that padlock off the tool-chest, eh? give it here! This woman's a fool,—ha, ha, ha!—she wanted to get away from me, and she's my wife!"
Another peal of dissonant laughter interrupted the words.
"What a d——d good joke! I swear I haven't laughed before, this dog's age! And then she was goin' to rid herself of the ring! as if that would help it! Why, there's the promise in black and white,—'love, honor, and obey,'—'I take thee, Abner,'—ha, ha! that's good! But fast bind, fast find; she a'n't going to get rid of the ring. I'll make it as tight as the promise; both of 'em 'll last to doomsday. Give me the padlock, you scoundrel!"
Bill, the man he addressed, knew too much to hesitate after the savage look that sent home the last words,—and, drawing from a bag of tools and dies a tiny padlock and key, he handed them to Dimock, who passed the chain about Hitty's thin white wrist, and, fastening it with the padlock, turned the key, and, withdrawing it from the lock, dropped it into the silvery heat of the forge, and burst into a fit of laughter, so savage and so inhuman that the bearded lips of his two comrades grew white with horror to hear the devil within so exult in his possession of a man.
Hitty sat, statue-like, in her chair; stooping, the man unbound her, and she rose slowly and steadily to her feet, looking him in the face.
"Look!" said she, raising her shackled arm high in air,—"I shall carry it to God!"—and so fled, up the broken stairway, out into the moonlight, across the meadow,—the three men following fast,—over the fallen boughs that winter had strewn along the shore, out under the crooked elm, swift as light, poising on the stern of the boat, that had swung out toward the channel,—and once more lifting her hand high into the white light, with one spring she dropped into the river, and its black waters rolled down to the sea.
THE END OF ALL.
Wandering along a waste
Where once a city stood,
I saw a ruined tomb,
And in that tomb an urn,—
A sacred funeral-urn,
Without a name or date,
And in its hollow depths
A little human dust!
Whose dust is this, I asked,
In this forgotten urn?
And where this waste now lies
What city rose of old?