AN AWFUL GRIEF.
“Must I really go? Oh, surely, gran’ther did not mean to be so cruel!
He is so fiery in his tempers, but presently he will be gentle as
a lamb again! Let me wait till he grows calmer! Oh, Heaven, it is
midnight, and freezing cold, and I have nowhere to go!” sobbed Eva,
clinging to the spinster, who shook her off scornfully, exclaiming:
“Yes, your gran’ther meant every word he said, an’ told me to start
you, an’ I’m going to do it! Decent females like Patty, an’ Lydia, and
me ain’t going to stay under the same roof with the likes o’ you till
morning.”
To do her justice, the woman believed implicitly in the truth of
Terry’s story, thinking that Eva’s explanation was a falsehood trumped
up on the spur of the moment to save herself.
Her virtuous soul boiled over with indignation against the “little
baggage,” as she called her in her thoughts, and she felt that Eva well
deserved the punishment that was meted out to her for her sin.
So she shook off the clinging grasp of the little white hands as if
they had been contamination, and turned a stony gaze on the big,
pleading dark eyes and tremulous red lips of the lovely outcast, adding
harshly:
“Don’t say you’ve nowhere to go, for there’s money in that purse to
take you to your dad in New York, where your gran’ther told you to go,
an’ where you should ha’ been all this time by good rights, instid
o’ here, taking the bread out o’ others’ mouths! Go, now, right to
the station, an’ you’ll ketch the New York train in time if you walk
fast. Good-by, an’ try to be a better girl hereafter. Well, I never!”
recoiling from the purse that Eva aimed at her head in a paroxysm of
indignant anger as she reached the door, flitting out like a shadow of
the autumn night, penniless, despairing, outcast from home and love,
with a blight upon her name.
“Let us keep the purse and divide it between us three. Gran’ther
needn’t ever know Eva didn’t take it!” Patty cried greedily, heedless
that it was her grandfather’s only wealth, the hoarded fifty dollars he
had been saving for his funeral expenses that his grandchildren need
not be embarrassed by his death.
There was no one to betray them, for the others had gone out to spread
the awful news of the tragedy, some to old Doctor Ludington’s, to awake
him to the awful truth; others to the town for the coroner and the
undertaker.
Meanwhile, Eva, dazed with grief and despair, had flitted out like
a shadow of the fateful Hallowe’en into the chilly night toward the
stable for Firefly.
She had no intention of seeking her father in New York, as she had been
bidden. Instead, her wistful thoughts turned in fancy toward a dear,
kind, old woman, a friend of her dead grandmother, who lived about
nine miles away on a high mountain. She would seek refuge with her,
biding gran’ther’s repentance, which she felt sure must come before
many days.
Alas! the mischievous spirits of Hallowe’en had worked havoc with her
plans.
The stable doors stood wide open, and Firefly and the other two horses
were gone, just as on last Hallowe’en, when they had been chased
several miles from home by youths on mischief bent.
“I must walk, and, oh! it is so cold, and the air is so smoky from the
forest fires that the moon gives no light. What if I get lost on the
mountain, and the wolves eat me up?” shuddered hapless Eva, setting
out, nevertheless, on her way toward the only refuge she knew, for, in
the near neighborhood, the Groves family had no warm friends by reason
of gran’ther’s unpopularity during the war, which had clung to him
tenaciously ever since.
She trudged on wearily, with the weight of an awful grief at her heart,
and great, burning tears blinding her sombre dark eyes, so that it was
no wonder that she could not see through the dense, overhanging smoke
from the mountains, where the woods had been on fire for days, until
all the neighbors were praying for rain to quench the spreading flames.
Wearily, tremblingly, the little thing plodded along the road,
shivering with cold, and starting at every sound of the eerie night,
for she had always been called timid, considering she was a country
girl, who oughtn’t to be afraid of anything.
Mile after mile she went through the night, little dreaming that she
had long ago lost her way and was wandering deeper into the woods at
every fearful step, till at last she walked into a little creek up to
her knees in the icy water.
Trying to get out, she fell sprawling down upon the rock bed, and
floundered there several moments before she extricated herself and
scrambled out, drenched and freezing, on the bank.
“Oh, Heaven, where have I wandered? I am lost in the woods, for there
is no creek in the road between here and Goody Brown’s!” she thought,
in despair.
She knew not which way to turn; she could not see her hand before her
in the darkness; but she felt that she would perish of cold and wet if
she did not keep moving, and the bitter thought came to her that she
could not keep going much longer for sheer fatigue, so that she must
sink down presently and freeze to death in the biting cold.
She was so young to die, and she loved life in spite of the cruel
disappointments it had brought her, still hoping for something brighter
in that distant future to which youth’s eyes are ever turned; so she
dragged herself up to her feet and ran with all her strength a little
way, then fell down, panting and exhausted, her wet garments freezing
to her limbs, the shoes torn from her tender feet by the rocky road,
the salt tears freezing on her cold cheeks.
She rested a few moments, then began to crawl along over the ground,
tearing her soft little hands on rocks and thorns till they bled, and
sobbing as she went:
“Oh, God, have mercy! Don’t let poor little Eva die of the cold out in
the lonesome woods without a friend to close her eyes!”
Oh, the night, how long and terrible it seemed. Though it was past
midnight when they had driven her out from home, and she seemed to have
been walking hours, and hours, and hours, no welcome rays of daylight
glimmered through the dense wooded gloom of the long night. In the
distance she heard the tu-whit of the mystic owl, and the almost human
scream of the terrible panther, thirsting for prey, and trembled and
shuddered with fear of becoming his victim. She moaned to herself that
if she lived until to-morrow all her golden hair would be turned white
by the agony of these interminable hours. She would be changed into an
old woman in a night.
Oh, the terror of the awful darkness and solitude, without one ray of
light or welcome sound! If she had possessed a fortune, little Eva
would have given it gladly for one sound of a human voice, even though
it spoke to her in chiding.
And through all the darkness there was one sight ever before her
eyes--the two men lying stark and dead in those crimson pools upon the
floor of her dainty little white-hung room, her maiden retreat from
all the world. That sight would haunt her till she died, be her years
few or many.
“I was not to blame. The sin lies at another’s door. Why did they drive
me out like a leper, to perish on the highway?” she moaned, dragging
herself on and on, until, finally, she sank down unconscious.
She lay like one dead on the carpet of dead leaves and briery vines.
Moments went by unheeded, until at last a dim, gray light filtered
through the darkness and the yellowish smoke from the distant fires.
The light spread and spread, grew bright, then golden.
She came to herself again with the sunlight slanting through dead,
leafless boughs, down into her pallid face, and, opening her dark eyes
wide, she sat up and looked around.
She was couched in the pathless woods. She heard the faint whir of the
pheasant’s wing, the plaintive call of the partridge, the low sough of
the wind in the pine trees, but no human voice mixed with the echoes of
woodland life.
She was stiff and sore, and her wet clothing clung to her limbs, a
little steam arising from them in the sun’s warming rays.