Zeus Gildersedge was a spare man; his weight was inconsiderable. His daughter put her arms about him, lifted him from the chair, and laid him upon the tattered sofa. His head rolled heavy upon her shoulder; his reeking breath beat upon her cheek. She shuddered and recoiled from him with an invincible disrelish as he lay snoring and gulping in his sleep. This sodden, greed-steeped piece of clay was her father.
Joan changed her drenched dress in her bedroom, looked into Rebecca’s attic and found it empty. She descended to the kitchen. The door stood wide and the place was empty; the fire had dwindled in the grate. A square of paper scrawled over with ill-formed characters lay on the table.
“Cook your own hash,” it ran. “I shall send my cousin Jim for my box to-morrow. I’ve gone, and pretty glad to go, you bet.”
Joan crumpled the document and flicked it into the fire. She closed and locked the kitchen door and made her supper off home-baked cake and milk. It had grown dusk apace. She lit a candle, passed through the hall, locking the door, and entered the dining-room again. Her father still snored on the sofa. She set the candle on the table and seated herself in the window-seat with the casement open.
A cleft in the agate foliage showed her the wizard west. The clouds had broken, and great bars of light gleamed in the darkening sky. A purple stairway seemed to ascend to a mysterious shrine shrouded in golden vapor.
Rossetti should have painted her as she sat at the casement with the failing light bathing her face. Her neck shone like alabaster. An infinite wistfulness mingled with the awakened sense of womanhood that burned in her eyes. Virgo Victrix! A fair soul set like a white rose in the dusky tresses of the night!
Great loneliness possessed her in the empty house. Her thoughts were shimmering in the sunshine by the green banks of a river. A willow overarched her head. Through the void of solitude thought echoed thought and soul answered soul. She imagined kisses on her lips. She imagined the touch of a man’s hand.
Night came and the west faded. The solitary candle burned on, streaking the gloom with its meagre flame. For hours the girl watched on wide-eyed into the night, beside the inanimate carcass of her drunken sire. Ere dawn came she had fallen asleep in the window-seat with her head pillowed on her arm. And a smile played upon the lips of the woman who dreamed a dream.
XII
A SPIRIT of unrest had fallen upon Gabriel Strong, a passionate discontent crying like a wild, prophetic voice out of the future. He was oppressed by numberless forebodings; his own heart piped dismally a traitorous refrain. A flippant levity served to cheat the curiosity of numberless excitable neighbors. Even John Strong believed his son to be in most excellent fettle and thoroughly enamoured of so passionate a bargain.