All night long Elizabeth watched a phantom landscape flit past the
window of the sleeping-car. Sometimes a cloud of smoke, shot through
with sparks, brushed the glass like a billowing curtain, and sometimes
the thunderous darkness of a tunnel swept between her and spectral
trees or looming hilltops. She lay there on her pillows, looking at the
flying glimmer of the night and drawing long breaths of peace. The
steady, rhythmical pounding of the wheels, the dull, rushing roar of
the rails, the black, spinning country outside her window, shut away
her old world of miseries and shames. Behind the stiff green curtains,
that swung in and out, in and out, to the long roll of the car, there
were no distractions, no fears of interruption, no listening
apprehensions; she could relax into the wordless and exultant certainty
of her purpose.
For at last, after these long months of mere endurance, she had a
purpose.
And how calmly she was fulfilling it! "For I am not angry," she said to
herself, with the same surprise she had felt when, at Willis's that
afternoon, she had denied Blair's charge of anger. Outside in the
darkness, all the world was asleep. The level stretches of vanishing
fields, the faint glisten of roads, were empty. When the train swept
thundering through little towns, the flying station lights, the twinkle
of street lamps, even the solitary lanterns of switchmen running along
the tracks, made the sleep seem only more profound. But Elizabeth was
awake in every fiber; once or twice, for the peace of it, she closed
her eyes; but she did not mean to sleep. She meant to think out every
step that she must take; but just at first, in the content of decision,
she did not even want to think. She only wanted to feel that the end
had come.
It was during the row up the river that her purpose had cleared before
her eyes; for an instant the sight of it had startled her into that
pallor which had frightened Blair; then she accepted it with a
passionate satisfaction. It needed no argument; she knew without
reasoning about it what she must do. But the way to do it was not
plain; it was while she and Blair sat at dinner, and he read his paper
and she played with her food, that a plan grew slowly in her mind. The
carrying it out--at least to this point; the alert and trembling fear
of some obstacle, had greatly exhausted her. It had also blotted out
everything but itself. She forgot her uncle and Miss White; that she
was going to give them pain did not occur to her until safe from their
possible interference, in the dark, behind the slowly swaying curtains
of her section, her fatigue began to lessen. Then, vaguely, she thought
of them. . . . they would be sorry. She frowned, faintly troubled by
their sorrow. It was midnight before she remembered Blair: poor Blair!
he cared so much about her. How could he,--when she did not care for
him? Still, it did not follow that not being loved prevented you from
loving. David had ceased to love her, but that had not made her love
cease. Yes; she was afraid they would all be unhappy; but it would be
only for a while. She sighed; it was a peaceful sigh. Her regret for
the sorrow that she would cause was the regret of one far off, helpless
to avert the pain, who has no relation to it except that of an
observer. She said to herself, calmly, "Poor Uncle Robert."
As she grew more rested, the vagueness of her regret sharpened a
little. She realized with a pang how worried they would be--before they
began to be sorry; and worry is so hard to bear! "I wish I could have
spared Uncle Robert and Cherry-pie," she said, in real distress. It
occurred to her that she had given them many unhappy moments. "I was
always a trouble; what a pity I was ever born." She thought suddenly of
her mother, remembering how she used to excuse her temper on the ground
that her mother had had no self-control. She smiled faintly in the
darkness at the childishness of such an excuse. "She wasn't to blame. I
could have conquered it, but I didn't. I did nothing all my life but
make trouble." She thought of her life as a thing of the past. "I was a
great trial to them; it will be better for everybody this way," she
said; and nestled down into the thought of the "way," with a
satisfaction which was absolute comfort. Better; but still better if
she had never lived. Then Blair would not have been disinherited, and
by being disinherited driven into the dishonor of keeping money not
intended for him. "It's really all my fault," she reflected, and looked
out of the window with unseeing eyes. Yes; all that had happened was
her fault. Oh, how many things she had hurt and spoiled! She had
injured Blair; his mother had said so. And poor Nannie! for Nannie's
offense grew out of Elizabeth's conduct. As for David--David, who had
stopped loving her. . . .
Well, she wouldn't hurt people any more, now. Never any more.
Just then the train jarred slowly to a standstill in a vast train-shed;
up under its glass and girders, arc-lamps sent lurching shadows through
the smoke and touched the clouds of steam with violet gleams. Elizabeth
could see dark, gnome-like creatures, each with a hammer, and with a
lantern swinging from a bent elbow, crouching along by the cars and
tapping every wheel. She counted the blows that tested the trucks for
the climb up the mountains: click-click; click-click. She was glad they
were testing them; she must get across the mountains safely; there must
be no interference or delay; she had so little time! For by morning
they would guess, those three worried people--who had not yet begun to
be sorry--they would guess what she had done, and they would follow
her. She saw the gnomes slouching back past the cars, upright this
time; then she felt the enormous tug of the engine beginning the
up-grade. It grew colder, and she was glad of the blankets which she
had not liked to touch when she first lay down in her berth. Outside
there was a faint whitening along the horizon; but it dimmed, and the
black outlines of the mountains were lost, as if the retreating night
hesitated and returned; then she saw that her window was touched here
and there by slender javelins of rain. They came faster and faster,
striking on and over one another; now they turned to drops; she stopped
thinking, absorbed in watching a drop roll down the glass--pause, lurch
forward, touch another drop; then a third; then zigzag rapidly down the
pane. She found herself following the racing drops with fascinated
eyes; she even speculated as to which would reach the bottom first; she
had a sense of luxury in being able, in the fortress of her berth, to
think of such things as racing raindrops. By the time it was light
enough to distinguish the stretching fields again, it was raining hard.
Once in a while the train rushed past a farm-house, where the smoke
from the chimney sagged in the gray air until it lay like a rope of
mist along the roof. It was so light now that she could see the sodden
carpet of yellow leaves under the maples, and she noticed that the
crimson pennons of the sumacs drooped and dripped and clung together.
The monotonous clatter of the wheels had fallen into a rhythm, which
pounded out steadily and endlessly certain words which were the refrain
of her purpose: _"Afterward, they will say I had the right to see
him."_ Sometimes she reminded herself, meekly, that he no longer loved
her. But there was no trace of resentment in her mind; how could he
love her? Nor did the fact that his love had ceased make any difference
in her purpose: "Afterward, they will say I had the right to see him."
When the day broke--a bleary, gray day, cold, and with sweeping showers
of rain, she slept for a little while; but wakened with a start, for
the train was still. Had they arrived? Had she lost a moment? Then she
recognized the locality, and knew that there was an hour yet before she
could be in the same city with him; and again the wheels began their
clamorous assertion: "the right to see him; the right to see him."
Her plan was simple enough; she would go at once to Mrs. Richie's house
and ask for the doctor. "I won't detain him very long; it will only
take a little while to tell him," she said to herself. It came over her
with the shivering sense of danger escaped, that in another day she
would have been too late, his mother would be at home! "She wouldn't
let him see me," she thought, fearfully. Afterward, after she had seen
him, she would take a train to New York and cross the ferry.... "The
water is pretty clean there," she thought.
She was dressed and ready to leave the train long before the station
was reached. When the unkempt, haggard crowd swarmed off the cars and
poured its jostling, hurrying length through the train-shed dim with
puffing clouds of steam and clamorous with engines, Elizabeth was as
fresh as if she had just come from her own house. She looked at herself
in one of the big mirrors of the station dressing-room with entire
satisfaction. "I am a little pretty even yet," she told herself,
candidly. She wanted very much to be pretty now. When she went out to
the street and found it raining in a steady, gray downpour, her heart
sank,--oh, she must not get wet and draggled, now! Just for this hour
she must be the old Elizabeth, the Elizabeth that he used to love,
fresh, with starry eyes and a shell-like color in her cheeks!--and
indeed the cold rain was making her face glow like a rose; but her eyes
were solemn, not starry. As her cab jolted along the rainy streets,
past the red-brick houses with their white shutters and scoured
door-steps--houses were people were eating their breakfasts and reading
their morning papers--Elizabeth, sitting on the frayed seat of the old
hack, looked out of the window and thought how strange it all was! It
would be just like this to-morrow morning, and she would not know it.
"How queer!" she said to herself. But she was not frightened. "I
suppose at the last minute I shall be frightened," she reflected. Then,
for a moment, she forgot David and tried to realize the unrealizable:
"everything will be going on just the same, and _I_--" She could not
realize it, but she did not doubt it. When the cab drew up at Mrs.
Richie's door, she was careful to pay the man before she got out so
that her hat should not be spoiled by the rain when David saw it.
"He isn't in, miss," the maid told her in answer to her ring.
Elizabeth gasped. "What! Not here? Where is he?"
"He went down to the beach, 'm, yesterday, to see to the closing-up of
the cottage, 'm."
"When is he coming back?" she said, faintly; and the woman said,
smiling, "To-morrow, 'm."
Elizabeth stood blankly on the door-step. To-morrow? There was not
going to be any to-morrow! What should she do? Her plan had been so
definite and detailed that this interruption of his absence--a
possibility which had not entered into her calculations--threw her into
absolute confusion. He was away from home! What could she do?
Entirely forgetting the rain, she turned away and walked aimlessly down
the street. "They'll know I've come here, and they'll find me before I
can see him!" she said to herself, in terror. "I must go somewhere and
decide what to do." She went into the nearest hotel and took a room. "I
must plan; if I wait until he comes back, they'll find me!" But it was
an hour before her plan was made; when it was, she sprang up with the
old, tumultuous joyousness. Why, of course! How stupid not to have
thought of it at once! She was so entirely oblivious of everything but
her own purpose that she would have gone out of the hotel on the
moment, had not the clerk checked her with some murmur about "a little
charge." Elizabeth blushed to her temples. "Oh, I _beg_ your pardon!"
she said. In her mortification she wished that the bill had been twice
as large. But when she was out in the rain, hurrying to the station,
again she forgot everything except her consuming purpose. In the
waiting-room--there were four hours before the train started--the panic
thought took possession of her that she might miss him if she went down
to the beach. "It's raining, and he may not stay over until to-morrow;
he may be coming up this afternoon. But if I stay here they'll come and
find me!" She could not face this last alternative. "They'll find me,
and I won't be able to tell him; they'll take me home, and he will not
have been told!" Sitting on the wooden settee in the ladies'
waiting-room, she watched the clock until its gaunt white face blurred
before her eyes. How the long hand crawled! Once, in a spasm of fright,
she thought that it had stopped, and perhaps she had lost her train!
But at last the moment came; she started,--and as she drew nearer and
nearer her goal, her whole body strained forward, as a man dying of
thirst strains toward a spring gleaming in the desert distance; once
she sighed with that anticipation of relief that is a shiver. Again the
monotonous clatter of the wheels beat out the words that all night long
over the mountains had grooved themselves into her brain: "Afterward,
they will say I had the right to see him." Love, which that one mad
hour, nearly three years before, had numbed and paralyzed, was
awakening. It was as if a slowly rising torrent, dammed by some
immovable barrier, had at last reached the brim,--trembled, hesitated:
then leaped in foaming overflow into its old course! She thought of all
the things she was going to tell him (but oh, they were so many, so
many; how could she say them all?). "'I never was so true as when I was
false. I never loved you so much as when I hated you. I never longed
for your arms as I did when--' O God, give me time to tell him that!
Don't let them find me before I can tell him that. _Don't_ let him have
gone back. God, please, _please_ let me find him at the cottage so I
can tell him." She was sitting on the plush cushion of the jolting,
swaying old car, her hand on the back of the seat in front of her,
every muscle tense with readiness to spring to her feet the moment the
train stopped.
It was still raining when she got off at the little station which had
sprung up out of the sand to accommodate a summer population. It was
deserted now, and the windows were boarded over. A passer-by, under a
dripping umbrella, lounged along the platform and stopped to look at
her. "Come down to see cottages?" he inquired. She said no; but could
she get a carriage to take her over to Little Beach?
He shook his head sympathetically. "A hack? _Here?_ Lord, no! There
isn't no depot carriage running at this time of year. You'd ought to
have got off at Normans, the station above this, and then you could
have drove over; fourteen miles, though. Something of a drive on an
evening like this! But Normans is quite a place. They run two depot
carriages there all winter and a dozen in summer."
"I'll walk," she told him, briefly.
"It's more 'an three miles," he warned her; "and it's sheeting down! If
I had such a thing as an umbrella, except this one, I'd--"
But she had gone. She knew the way; she remembered the summer--oh, so
long ago!--when she and Nannie had driven over that sandy road along
the beach on their way to Mrs. Richie's house. It was so deep with mud
now that sometimes she had to walk outside the wheel-ruts into the wiry
beach-grass. The road toiled among the dunes; on the shore on her right
she could hear the creaming lap of the waves; but rain was driving in
from the sea in an impenetrable curtain, and only when in some turn of
the wind it lifted and shifted could she catch a glimpse of the scarf
of foam lying on the sands, or see the gray heave of an endless expanse
that might be water or might be sky folded down into the water. It was
growing dark; sometimes she blundered from the road to one side or the
other; sometimes she thought she saw approaching figures--a man,
perhaps, or a vehicle; but as she neared them they were only bushes or
leaning, wind-beaten pines. She was drenched and her clothes seemed
intolerably heavy. Oh, how David would laugh at her hat! She put up her
hand, in its soaked and slippery glove, and touched the roses about the
crown and laughed herself. "He won't mind," she said, contentedly. She
had forgotten that he had stopped loving her. She began to sing under
her breath the old tune of her gay, inconsequent girlhood--
"Oh, won't it be joyful, joyful, joyful,
Oh, won't it be joyful, to meet..."
She stopped; something warm was on her face; she had not known that she
was weeping. Suddenly, far off, she saw a glimmer of light.... Mrs.
Richie's house! Her heart rose in her throat. "David," she said aloud,
weakly, "David, I'm coming just as fast as I can."
But when she opened the door of the living-room in the little house
that sat so close to the crumpling lap and crash of the tide, and saw
him, his pipe in his hand, half rising from his chair by the fire and
turning around to see who had entered, she could hardly speak his
name--"_David_."