She could feel the tense grasp upon her arm relax a little. This was
just the kind of result she had aimed for.
"I want ye t' stay this side the river a spell yet, an' we'll eat somepn
somewhere. Hey?"
The fingers about her arm had acquired a fondling laxity that half
sickened her. But she waited a little. They were a good ten yards from
the boat. It was possible that both their figures were too shadowed for
the men at the chains to see them. Perhaps, on the other hand, these
wardens did not care to shout a final notice that the boat was now
unmoored.
Claire still chose to temporize. Her heart beat so that it seemed about
to burst through her side; but she nevertheless kept her brain clear
enough to maintain a subtlety of intent in strange contrast to her deep
fear.
She had determined to get free if she could, and find refuge among the
passengers on the boat. Here, in the lonely dusk of the dock, she was at
a sad disadvantage; but once within the lighted cabin of the boat, she
could find the same silent protection of mere surrounding that the car
had afforded. She had a latent resolve, also, of future appeal to some
of those whom she knew had preceded her, though this formed no real
part of her present quick-formed scheme.
"Suppose that I do go with you," she said. "At what time would I be able
to get home?"
Slocumb's grasp materially loosened. "Why, any time at all!" he
exclaimed. "The boats run till 'bout two o'clock or so, an'"--
His sentence was cut short in its valuable explanation by a sudden
disengaging spring on the part of Claire. She ran with her best speed
toward the boat. She now perceived that it was just leaving the pier. By
the time that she had gained almost the extreme edge of the latter, a
voice from the receding boat itself cried out to her, "Don't jump!"
She saw, then, that a long, curved crevice was widening in a very rapid
way at a slight space beyond the spot where she had abruptly halted. A
few more seconds would make the leap a mere madness; now it needed
nerve, agility, and was indeed a venture. But Slocumb stood behind her.
The risk was worth the prize. Claire waited perhaps ten seconds; the
crevice had grown a fissure; she saw the murky water give a dull flash
or two, far below it. Then she jumped.
The space had not been more than three feet. She cleared it well. But
_what she had cleared_ sent a sharp terror through her the instant after
both feet had touched the firm bourne of the deck. For a little while
she stood quite still, shivering, with her back to the dock thus boldly
quitted. Her mind was wholly in a whirl. She did not hear the
half-growled words of one of the men who had lately unloosed the boat,
chiding her upon her folly, in gruff contempt of syntax.
But very soon this access of intense alarm lessened. She partly ceased
to fix her thought upon what she had done, recalling instead, why she
had done it. She turned, giving two flurried looks to right and left,
doubtless from a sense that the abhorred one might have breasted the
same peril as herself--in his case far lighter, of course.
Her gaze swept the opposite pier. It gleamed drowsy and obscure, with
the effect of some grave marine monster just risen from the muddy tides
below it. Strangely, also, the lights at either side gave it the
semblance of two malign blazing eyes. And in the glimmer thus made
Claire saw Slocumb.
He had not taken the leap. At first amazement had wrought in him its
brief yet telling effect. Then he had dashed to the end of the pier,
momentarily furious at thus being balked. But in a second his fury had
cooled. And something had cooled it, very new to him, though very
forcible. This was pity. He might easily have cleared the interspace.
But he forbore to do so. He thrust both hands into his pockets, and with
lowered head moved away. In an instant more it was too late for him to
have changed his novel resolve, even had he so wished.
By the time that Claire's look lighted upon the pier he was nowhere
visible. He had disappeared from her sight forever, as also from her
life. He had been a dread though brief experience--a glimpse given her
into the melancholy darkness of human wrong. The shadows had seemed to
take him back among themselves, where he rightly belonged. Perhaps the
episode of his insolence wrought some sort of effect upon her future
acts; it is certain that she never quite forgot the miserable dismay he
had roused; and when the struggle for worldly success afterward spurred
her with so keen a goad, some vague remembrance of to-night may have
quickened her aspiring impulses and made what we call the socially best
gain fresh worth in her eyes by contrast with such foul deeps as lie
below it.
Once confident that Slocumb had not followed her, she managed, with
unsteady pace, to reach the outer rail of the deck and lean against it
while the boat traversed the river. She was trembling a good deal, and
felt an extreme weakness as well. But a glow of triumph upbore her. She
had escaped at last!
The ugly boat, as it sped along, seemed a sentient accomplice of her
final good fortune. She had a fancy that its thick wooden rail dumbly
throbbed beneath her grasp. Her posture was a half-cowering one; the
spell of her poignant fears had not yet passed. Her head leaned itself
peeringly from stooped shoulders in such a way that its slim neck took
the sort of curve we see in a frightened deer's.
A somewhat late moon had recently risen, whose advent had altered the
whole face of the heavens, flooding it with a spectral, yellowish light.
But borne rapidly across the moon's blurred disk, on some high, fleet
rush of air, scudded volumes of rolling and mutable vapor. They
constantly soared above the great dusky city, at first in dense black
masses, then thinning and lengthening as they came midway between zenith
and horizon. While Claire watched these strange and volatile clouds, so
incessant in their motion and so swift in their continual upward stream,
they took, for her confused fancy, the semblance of pursuant phantom
shapes. They formed themselves into visages and bodies; they stretched
forth uncouth yet life-like arms; they clenched hands of misty gloom,
and shook them far above her, with ghostly, imminent defiance. Her
former transit across the river had been fraught with sweet, poetic
mystery; her present voyage was one touched with a kind of allegoric
terror.
But the boat soon found its second wharfage. Claire sped out through the
two cabins in time to join the crowd of disembarking passengers. Once
more back in Greenpoint, she hurried along certain familiar streets
until she arrived at her own dwelling. It was now a little after ten
o'clock. She had an instinct that it was about this time. Above the high
piazza, both parlor-windows were dark, but below it the windows of the
basement portion were brightly lit. She passed into the scant space of
garden and sought the lower door; she pulled the bell, set in the
woodwork at her right, and waited.
No answer came, and she rang again. One of the side-lights gave her a
good view into the hall beyond. She presently saw her mother appear.
Mrs. Twining opened the door. It was not till she and her daughter stood
face to face that the latter made a certain sharp, abrupt discovery.
"Mother!" she said, "you're pale--you look very strange. Is it because I
staid away so long?"
"No," replied Mrs. Twining.
Claire grasped her mother's arm with both hands. "Then what is it?" she
questioned. "You don't mean that--that Father's sick? _Do_ you?"
Mrs. Twining was white as death, and had dark rings round her fine black
eyes. She laughed with great bitterness as she closed the door.
"Oh, no," she said. "Your father ain't sick, Claire."
These few words teemed, somehow, with a frightful irony. Claire knew her
mother's moods so well that she now staggered backward a little as the
two faced each other in this narrow hallway.
"Mother," she said, with a gasp, "what do you mean? Has anything
_happened_ to Father?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Twining with a cruelty that Claire never forgot and
never forgave. "Your father's dead. He died at nine o'clock. The
doctor's here now. He says it's heart-disease. You're a nice gadabout,
to be off for hours, nobody knows where, and come home to find" ...
Mrs. Twining ended her sentence at just this point, for Claire had
dropped in a swoon before the next word could be spoken, upon the
oil-cloth of the little hall which her own hands had so often swept.