Across the country Daunt strode, paying little heed to his direction.
He skirted one field, crossed another, swung through a gully, scrambled
along a gravel-pit, climbed a hilly slope, and cut across in a wide
circuit. He thought that physical weariness might bring mental relief.
He paused for a moment by the edge of a clayey bank, in which a
multitude of tiny sand-swallows--winged cliff-dwellers--had pecked them
vaulted homes. He thrust his stick gently into one of the openings and
smiled to see the bridling anger of its feathered inhabitant.
Seating himself upon a pile of split rails in a fence corner, he
dropped into reverie. He was conscious of an immense depression. The
past few weeks had brought him nearer to realizing how much Margaret
meant, not only to himself, but to his labor in the world, than he had
ever been before. His artistic temperament had pointed him a dreamer,
but his natural earnestness had made him a laborious one. His ideals
were fresh and strong, and the world of tangled interests and woven
ambitions had stood before him always, mute, importunate, a place
to make them real. In man’s ear there sound ever three voices: the
brazen-throated throng, the silver-throated few and the golden-throated
one. This last voice Daunt had learned to listen to. He had made
Margaret his unconscious motive. The best of his written work had been
done at the huge antique mahogany desk under her picture. What she had
been to his work, what she was then, showed him what her presence or
absence in his life must inevitably mean. He realized the truth of what
he had once scoffed at, that behind every man’s success lies the heart
of a woman.
He felt a profound disheartenment. His mind skimmed the waste of his
younger years. It saw his toils as little things and the work he had
praised in himself as that of a trifler. He knew now his capacities
for ambition. He saw inspiration for the first time as, on a twilit
highway, one sees a fancied bush, with a sudden movement, resolve
itself into a human figure. He saw his past, harvestless. Fate had
taken his youth, like a handful of sand, and fed it to the sea! Since
Margaret had gone, his work had been purposeless, barren--it wanted her
presence.
He had lighted his pipe mechanically, and through the blue-pale smoke
whorls, a near bush took on the outline of her clear profile, reclined
against a dusky cushion. His longing filled the silence with an inward
voice:
“You are the woman,” it said, “that I have always wanted! I want
you all! I want your childish shallows and your womanly deeps! I
want your weakness and your strength! I want you just as you are, no
different--you, yourself.”
She was sitting before him now in the firelight of her room, where
the tongues of the burning drift-wood and salt-dusted larch sprang
up, blue, magenta and purplish-green, prickling the brass-work of the
fireplace into a thousand many-colored points, and he was leaning
forward, speaking, with his bare heart behind set lips: “I love you.
All that I have for you that you will not own! All that you might be to
me that you will not give!”
He felt her present trouble vaguely and with the same impotent
resentment that he had felt in that far-off yet ridiculously near
child-life, when in all the lofty manhood of his eight years he had
defied the cliff-winds--that childhood which lived in his memory as a
stretch of sun-drowned sea-beach swept by wind; a dim background in a
frame of sharp outline, which held little images of delicate fragrance,
clear and sweet, on the retina of his memory. This woman met him in a
pain, measured by his added years, that he was powerless to appease.
Knocking the cold ashes from his pipe, Daunt rose and stretched his
arms wide along the topmost rail of the shambling fence and gazed out
across the evening hills, blurred by the blue of distance, into the
red sunset. Far to the left, glooming from encircling elms, lay the
house that sheltered Margaret. Down below him, in the railroad cut,
crawled a deliberate tank-train. From where he stood, he could see the
ungainly arm of the slung pipe, through which the thirsty engine drank
deep draughts. Sitting in the chill air had told him his fatigue, and
his wrist had grown stiff and painful. He felt unequal to the long walk
across to Tenbridge, and, consulting his watch, reflected that the
city-bound train, almost due, would carry him to the little Guthrie
junction, shortening his walk by half.
He pushed rapidly down the hill road, grateful for the heat of renewed
motion. The station was deserted. One shabby hack drowsed driverless
under the shed, and even the ticket agent had apparently forsaken his
grating.
Sauntering across the platform, Daunt leaned against the signal-post,
on whose swinging arm a round, fevered eye watched, unwinkingly and
angry, for the distant train, fast growing from a bright pin point to
a blazing blotch of yellow, between the spun-out rails. Its attenuated
rumbling had swelled to a trembling roar. His pre-occupation was so
deep that the clamorous iron thing was upon him almost before he heard
it. The surprise jarred him into sudden movement, and it was then that
his tired limbs lurched under him; the sucking vortex of the hurtling
mass threw him off his balance, he wavered, stumbled, fell--and the
pitiless armored monster, plunging, gigantic, regardless, caught him on
its mailed side and passed on, to shudder, to slow, to stop--too late!