Easton saw the Woodwards drive up to the church; but Mrs. Farrell was not with them. He had not meant to go, even if she had come; yet it was a disappointment not to see her come. He went indoors and looked listlessly about the office, which had once been a barroom, and could not have been so dreary in its wicked days as now. Its manners had not improved with its morals. It was stained with volleys adventurously launched in the direction of a spittoon, it smelled of horse and hostler, and it was as dull as a water cooler, a hotel register, a fragment of circus bill, a time-table of the Pekin & Scatticong Railroad, can make a place. Easton went and sat upon the gallery till the people came out of church and dispersed; then he abruptly left the porch and struck out through the heat, across the graveyard and along the top of a bare ridge of pasture, toward the woods that lay between the village and Woodward farm. He could think of no other place to pass the time but that which had yesterday heard him say he loved her. The whole affair had taken a dozen different phases during the night, as he turned from side to side in his sleeplessness. Once he had even beheld her in that character of arch-flirt in which Gilbert had denounced her. He saw a reckless design in what she had done, a willful purpose to test her power upon them both. But for the instant that this doubt lasted he did not cease to love her, to feel her incomparable charm. However she had wronged them, he could not do otherwise than remain true to her against every consequence. His love, which had seemed to spring into full life at the first sight of her, had been poisoned from the very beginning by the suspicion of others, and every day since then she had said or done things that were capable of being taken in the sense of consciously insolent caprice; yet all her audacity might be innocent in the very measure of its excess; and there was mixed with that potential slight toward her in his heart such tenderness and sweet delight, such joy in her beauty, grace, and courage, that every attempt to analyze her acts or motives ended in a rapturous imagination of her consent to be loved by him. He could not help feeling that she had not discouraged him; he excused the delay which she had imposed; how, when he thought of the conditions which she had made, could he doubt her goodness or fail to know her regret? He went, thinking, on toward the spot he was seeking, and sometimes he walked very swiftly and sometimes he found he had stopped stock still, under the blazing sun, in attitudes of perplexity and musing. When at last he entered the dell, from the field on which they had yesterday emerged, drops of perspiration rolled down his forehead, and the shadow of the place had a sultriness of its own, in which his breath came almost as faintly as in the open sunshine of the meadows. He went toward the pool where the cattle drank, and bathed his face; then, seeking out that shelf of rock where she had sat, he laid himself down on the ledge below it and fondly strove to make her seem still there.
He fell into a deep reverie, in which he was at first sensible of a great fatigue, and then of a lightness and ease of heart such as he had not felt for the whole week past. While he lay in this tranquillity, he seemed to see Gilbert and Mrs. Farrell come laughing and talking up the glen together: Gilbert was dressed in his suit of white flannel, but she wore a gown of dark crimson silk, stiff with its rich texture, and trailing after her on the gray rocks and over the green ferns. Her head was bare, and in the dark folds of her hair was wound a string of what seemed red stones at first, like garnets in color, but proved, as she came nearer, to be the translucent berries of a poisonous vine. When she saw that they had caught his eye, she took Gilbert by the hand and called out to Easton, “Now you can’t escape. He’s going to make up with you whether you will or no. I’ve told him everything and he understands. Isn’t it so—Major?” They looked at each other, and, with a swift, significant glance at Easton, burst into a laugh, which afflicted him with inexpressible shame and pain. He shuddered as Gilbert took him in his arms in token of reconciliation, and then he found himself in a clutch from which he could not escape. Mrs. Farrell had vanished, but “Easton, Easton!” he heard the voice of Gilbert saying, “what’s the matter?” And opening his eyes, he found his friend kneeling over him and looking anxiously into his face.
“I’ve been asleep, haven’t I?” he asked, stupidly.
“Yes, and going it on rather a high-stepping nightmare,” answered Gilbert, with his old smile. “Better have a little dip at the brook;” and Easton mechanically obeyed. He drew out his handkerchief to dry his face, and knew by the perfume it shed that it was the handkerchief Mrs. Farrell had restored. His heart somehow ached as he inhaled its fragrance, and he felt the old barrier, which had not existed for the moment, re-established between himself and Gilbert. He came and sat down constrainedly where he had been lying.
“I hope you won’t be the worse, my dear fellow, for your little nap,” said Gilbert. “Fortunately, there isn’t a spot in the universe where a man could take cold to-day.”
“I think I’m all right,” said Easton, and he looked down, to avoid Gilbert’s eyes.
Gilbert continued to gaze at him with the amused smile of patronage which people wear at the sight of one not yet wholly emerged from the mist of dreams, and waited for a while before he spoke again. Then he said, “Easton, if you’re perfectly awake, I wish you’d hear me say what a very extraordinary kind of ass I think I’ve been for the past week or so.”
Easton looked up, and there was his friend holding out his hand to him and gazing at him with shining eyes. He could not say anything, but he took the hand and pressed it as he had that day when they had pledged each other not to let harm come between them.
“Confound it!” Gilbert went on, “I knew all the time that I was wrong, but I had to get away before I could face the thing and fairly look it out of countenance.”
“Did you have a good time?” asked Easton, his voice husky with the emotion to which he refused sentimental utterance.