"There! Here we are at last, no weather for a dog to be out," growled
the angry coachman sulkily, jumping down from the box and opening the
carriage door with a respectful bow, hat in hand.
Mr. Ogden staggered quickly out and lifted tenderly and carefully a
woman's form to the wet ground. Young Burge, the deserted husband, had
just come down with the help of the coachman who growled something he
could not understand.
He looked at the woman in the darkness and a mist swam before his eyes;
he leaned against the coach and his knees shook so that he could not
make a single step. The night was black and the wind sobbed down the
street, while the rain still fell in torrents.
He could not see clearly--but that voice--that voice! God! "Could they
have been right--these wicked, malicious gnomes? Did they know all
about her and now, how?" he asked himself while his hands clutched the
book convulsively in his helpless agony.
He thought he heard them again whispering, with a derisive chuckle, the
whole story of her downfall into his terrified ears.
"How could she ever come to such magnificent clothes?" he thought.
"Nonsense! It is simply a hallucination of a morbid, disordered
brain. I am sick and miserable and see things where there is nothing
to see." This he murmured half aloud to himself, gazing at the
retreating form of the woman incredulously. He could not distinguish
her features and he made up his mind forcibly, in order to quiet down
his excited nerves, that it was nothing else but a foolish trick of
his imagination, and the fever which shook him now again was the
obvious cause of it all. "Anyway, how could she have obtained all this
luxurious outfit? His wife wealthy? Nonsense!"
He tried to laugh cheerfully about this foolishness, but suddenly he
felt as though a knife were plunged into his heart. "The gnomes! the
gnomes! If that which they had said were true!" He moaned to himself,
leaning against the wall in a faint condition. "Oh, anything but that
... anything but that!" His whole frame shook as from palsy. That voice
haunted him. He knew he had to go and look at her in order to convince
himself, otherwise he could not find any rest.