“Mrs. Ormond really lost her patience with him, and felt better than she
had for a long time by scolding him in good earnest. She told him he was
talking very blasphemously, and when he urged that his morality was
directly in line with Parnell’s, and Parnell was an archbishop, she was
so vexed that she would not go to drive with him that morning, though he
apologized and humbled himself in every way. He pleaded that it was such
a beautiful day, it must be the last they were going to have; it was
getting near the equinox, and this must be a weather-breeder. She let him
go off alone, for he would not lose the drive, and she watched him out of
sight from her upper window with a heavy heart. As soon as he was fairly
gone, she wanted to go after him, and she was wild all the forenoon. She
could not stay indoors, but kept walking up and down the piazza and
looking for him, and at times she went a bit up the road he had taken, to
meet him. She had got to thinking of the tramp, though the man had gone
directly off down another road after he had his breakfast. At last she
heard the old creaking, rattling buggy, and as soon as she saw Ormond’s
bare head, and knew he was all right, she ran up to her room and shut
herself in. But she couldn’t hold out against him when he came to her
door with an armful of wild flowers that he had gathered for her, and
boughs from some young maples that he had found all red in a swamp. She
showed herself so interested that he asked her to come with him after
their midday dinner and see them, and she said perhaps she would, if he
would promise not to keep talking about the things that made her so
miserable. He asked her, ‘What things?’ and she answered that he knew
well enough, and he laughed and promised.
“She didn’t believe he would keep his word, but he did at first, and he
tried not to tease her in any way. He tried to please her in the whims
and fancies she had about going this way or that, and when she decided
not to look up his young maples with him, because the first autumn leaves
made her melancholy, he submitted. He put his arm across her shoulder as
they drove through the woods, and pulled her to him, and called her ‘poor
old thing,’ and accused her of being morbid. He wanted her to tell him
all there was in her mind, but she could not; she could only cry on his
arm. He asked her if it was something about him that troubled her, and
she could only say that she hated to see people so cheerful without
reason. That made him laugh, and they were very gay after she had got her
cry out; but he grew serious again. Then her temper rose, and she asked,
‘Well, what is it?’ and he said at first, ‘Oh, nothing,’ as people do
when there is really something, and presently he confessed that he was
thinking about what she had said of his being cheerful without reason.
Then, as she said, he talked so beautifully that she had to keep her
patience with him, though he was not keeping his word to her. His talk,
as far as she was able to report it, didn’t amount to much more than
this: that in a world where death was, people never could be cheerful
with reason unless death was something altogether different from what
people imagined. After people came to their intellectual consciousness,
death was never wholly out of it, and if they could be joyful with that
black drop at the bottom of every cup, it was proof positive that death
was not what it seemed. Otherwise there was no logic in the scheme of
being, but it was a cruel fraud by the Creator upon the creature; a poor
practical joke, with the laugh all on one side. He had got rid of his
fear of it in that light, which seemed to have come to him before the
fear left him, and he wanted her to see it in the same light, and if he
died before her--But there she stopped him and protested that it would
kill her if she did not die first, with no apparent sense, even when she
told me, of her fatuity, which must have amused poor Ormond. He said what
he wanted to ask was that she would believe he had not been the least
afraid to die, and he wished her to remember this always, because she
knew how he always used to be afraid of dying. Then he really began to
talk of other things, and he led the way back to the times of their
courtship and their early married days, and their first journeys
together, and all their young-people friends, and the simple-hearted
pleasure they used to take in society, in teas and dinners, and going to
the theater. He did not like to think how that pleasure had dropped out
of their life, and he did not know why they had let it, and he was going
to have it again when they went to town.
“They had thought of staying a long time in the country, perhaps till
after Thanksgiving, for they had become attached to their place; but now
they suddenly agreed to go back to New York at once. She told me that as
soon as they agreed she felt a tremendous longing to be gone that
instant, as if she must go to escape from something, some calamity, and
she felt, looking back, that there was a prophetic quality in her
eagerness.”
“Oh, she was always so,” said Minver. “When a thing was to be done, she
wanted it done like lightning, no matter what the thing was.”
“Well, very likely,” Wanhope consented. “I never make much account of
those retroactive forebodings. At any rate, she says she wanted him to
turn about and drive home so that they could begin packing, and when he
demurred, and began to tease, as she called it, she felt as if she should
scream, till he turned the old horse and took the back track. She was
_wild_ to get home, and kept hurrying him, and wanting him to whip the
horse; but the old horse merely wagged his tail, and declined to go
faster than a walk, and this was the only thing that enabled her to
forgive herself afterward.”
“Why, what had she done?” Rulledge asked. “She would have been
responsible for what happened, according to her notion, if she had had
her way with the horse; she would have felt that she had driven Ormond to
his doom.”
“Of course!” said Minver. “She always found a hole to creep out of. Why
couldn’t she go back a little further, and hold herself responsible
through having made him turn round?”
“Poor woman!” said Rulledge, with a tenderness that made Minver smile.
“What was it that did happen?”
Wanhope examined his cup for some dregs of coffee, and then put it down
with an air of resignation. I offered to touch the bell, but, “No,
don’t,” he said. “I’m better without it.” And he went on: “There was a
lonely piece of woods that they had to drive through before they struck
the avenue leading to their house, which was on a cheerful upland
overlooking the river, and when they had got about half-way through this
woods, the tramp whom Ormond had fed in the morning, slipped out of a
thicket on the hillside above them, and crossed the road in front of
them, and slipped out of sight among the trees on the slope below. Ormond
stopped the horse, and turned to his wife with a strange kind of whisper.
‘Did you see it?’ he asked, and she answered yes, and bade him drive on.
He did so, slowly looking back round the side of the buggy till a turn of
the road hid the place where the tramp had crossed their track. She could
not speak, she says, till they came in sight of their house. Then her
heart gave a great bound, and she broke out on him, blaming him for
having encouraged the tramp to lurk about, as he must have done, all day,
by his foolish sentimentality in taking his breakfast out to him. ‘He saw
that you were a delicate person, and now to-night he will be coming
round, and--’ She says Ormond kept looking at her, while she talked, as
if he did not know what she was saying, and all at once she glanced down
at their feet, and discovered that her hat was gone.
“That, she owned, made her frantic, and she blazed out at him again, and
accused him of having lost her hat by stopping to look at that worthless
fellow, and then starting up the horse so suddenly that it had rolled
out. He usually gave her as good as she sent when she let herself go in
that way, and she told me she would have been glad if he had done it now,
but he only looked at her in a kind of daze, and when he understood, at
last, he bade her get out and go into the house--they were almost at the
door,--and he would go back and find her hat himself. ‘Indeed, you’ll do
nothing of the kind,’ she said she told him. ‘I shall go back with you,
or you’ll be hunting up that precious vagabond and bringing him home to
supper.’ Ormond said, ‘All right,’ with a kind of dreamy passivity, and
he turned the old horse again, and they drove slowly back, looking for
the hat in the road, right and left. She had not noticed before that it
was getting late, and perhaps it was not so late as it seemed when they
got into that lonely piece of woods again, and the veils of shadow began
to drop round them, as if they were something falling from the trees, she
said. They found the hat easily enough at the point where it must have
rolled out of the buggy, and he got down and picked it up. She kept
scolding him, but he did not seem to hear her. He stood dangling the hat
by its ribbons from his right hand, while he rested his left on the
dashboard, and looking--looking down into the wooded slope where the
tramp had disappeared. A cold chill went over her, and she stopped her
scolding. ‘Oh, Jim,’ she said, ‘do you see something? What do you see?’
He flung the hat from him, and ran plunging down the hillside--she
covered up her face when she told me, and said she should always see him
running--till the dusk among the trees hid him. She ran after him, and
she heard him calling, calling joyfully, ‘Yes, I’m coming!’ and she
thought he was calling back to her, but the rush of his feet kept getting
farther, and then he seemed to stop with a sound like falling. He
couldn’t have been much ahead of her, for it was only a moment till she
stood on the edge of a boulder in the woods, looking over, and there at
the bottom Ormond was lying with his face turned under him, as she
expressed it; and the tramp, with a heavy stick in his hand, was standing
by him, stooping over him, and staring at him. She began to scream, and
it seemed to her that she flew down from the brink of the rock, and
caught the tramp and clung to him, while she kept screaming ‘Murder!’
The man didn’t try to get away; he only said, over and over, ‘I didn’t
touch him, lady; I didn’t touch him.’ It all happened simultaneously,
like events in a dream, and while there was nobody there but herself
and the tramp, and Ormond lying between them, there were some people
that must have heard her from the road and come down to her. They were
neighbor-folk that knew her and Ormond, and they naturally laid hold of
the tramp; but he didn’t try to escape. He helped them gather poor Ormond
up, and he went back to the house with them, and staid while one of them
ran for the doctor. The doctor could only tell them that Ormond was dead,
and that his neck must have been broken by his fall over the rock. One of
the neighbors went to look at the place the next morning, and found one
of the roots of a young tree growing on the rock, torn out, as if Ormond
had caught his foot in it; and that had probably made his fall a headlong
dive. The tramp knew nothing but that he heard shouting and running, and
got up from the foot of the rock, where he was going to pass the night,
when something came flying through the air, and struck at his feet. Then
it scarcely stirred, and the next thing, he said, the lady was _onto_
him, screeching and tearing. He piteously protested his innocence, which
was apparent enough, at the inquest, and before, for that matter. He said
Ormond was about the only man that ever treated him white, and Mrs.
Ormond was remorseful for having let him get away before she could tell
him that she didn’t blame him, and ask him to forgive her.”