THE STRENGTH OF THE WEAK
It was pitch-dark when Jessica reached the sanatorium, though she went
like a whirlwind, the chill damp smell of the dewy balsams in her
nostrils, the dust rising ghost-like behind the rapid hoofs. She found
David Stires anxious and peevish over her late coming.
Sitting beside him as he ate his supper, and reading to him afterward,
she had little time for coherent thought; all the while she was
maintaining her self-control with an effort. Since she had ridden away
that afternoon, she felt as if years had gone over her with all their
changes. She was oppressed with a new sense of fate, of power beyond and
stronger than herself, and her mind was enveloped in a haze of futurity.
She felt a relief when the old man grew tired and was wheeled to his
bedroom.
Left alone, her reflections returned. She began to be tortured. She
tried to read--the printed characters swam beyond her comprehension. At
length she drew a hood over her head and stole out on to the wide porch.
It was only nine o'clock, and along the gravel paths that wound among
the shrubbery a few dim forms were strolling--she caught the scent of a
cigar and the sound of a woman's laugh. The air was crisp and bracing,
with a promise of frost and painted leaves. She gazed down across the
dark gulches toward the town, a straggling design pricked in blinking
yellow points. Halfway between, folded in the darkness, lay the green
shelf and the cabin to which her thought recurred with a kind of
compulsion.
Her eyes searched the darkness anxiously. He had seemed dangerously ill;
he might die, perhaps. If he did, what would it be for her, his wife,
but freedom from a galling bond? She thought of the violin playing. Had
that been but the soul's swan-song, the last cry of his stained and
desolate spirit before it passed from this world that knew its
temptation and its fall? If she could only know what the doctor had
said!
There was no moon, but the stars were glowing like tiny, green-gilt
coals, and the yellow road lay plain and clear. With a sudden
determination she drew her light cloak closely about her, stepped down,
sped across the grass to a footpath, and so to the road.
As she ran on down the curving stretch under the trees, moving like a
hastening, gray phantom through a purple world of shadows, the
crackling slip of bank-paper that lay in her bosom seemed to burn her
flesh. She was stealing away to gaze upon the outcast who had shamed and
humbled her--going, she knew not why, with burning cheeks and hammering
heart.
She slipped through the side trail to the cabin with a choking
sensation. She stole to the window and peered in--in the firelight she
could see the form on the bunk, tossing and muttering. Otherwise the
place was empty. She lifted the latch softly and entered.
The strained anxiety of Jessica's look relaxed as she gazed about her.
She saw the phial on the table--the doctor had been there, then. If he
were in serious case, Prendergast would be with him. She threw back her
hood, drew one of the chairs to the side of the bunk and sat down, her
eyes fixed on his face. The weakness and helplessness of his posture
struck through and through her. Two sides of her were struggling in a
chaotic combat for mastery.
"I hate you! I hate you!" she said under her breath, clenching her cold
hand. "I _must_ hate you! You stole my love and put it under your feet!
You have disgraced my present and ruined my future! What if you have
forgotten the past--your crime? Does that make you the less guilty, or
me the less wretched?"
But withal a silent voice within her gave the lie to her vehemence.
Some element of her character that had been rigid and intact was
crumbling down. An old, sweet something, that a dreadful mill had ground
and crushed and annihilated, was rising whole and undefiled, superior to
any petty distinction, regardless of all that lifted combative in her
inheritance, not to be gainsaid or denied.
She leaned closer, listening to the incoherent words and broken phrases
borne on the turbid channels of fever. But she could not link them
together into meaning. Only one name he spoke clearly over and over
again--the name Hugh Stires--repeated with the dreary monotony of a
child conning a lesson. She noted the mark across his brow. Before her
marriage, in her blindness, she had used to wonder what it was like. It
was not in the least disfiguring--it gave a touch of the extraordinary.
It was so small she did not wonder that in that ecstatic moment of her
bride's kiss she had not seen it.
Slowly, half fearfully, she stretched out her hand and laid it on his.
As if at the touch the mutterings ceased. The eyes opened, and a
confused, troubled look crept to them. Then they closed again, and the
look faded out into a peace that remained.
Jessica dropped to her knees and buried her face in the blanket,
burning and chilling with an indescribable sensation of mingled pain and
pleasure. She scarcely knew what she was thinking. It seemed to her that
his very weakness and helplessness voiced again the something that had
sounded in the music of the violin, when the buried, forgotten past had
cried out its pain and shame and plea, half unconsciously--to her! A
thrill ran through her, the sense of moral power of the weak over the
strong, of the feminine over the masculine.
A rising flush stained her cheeks. With a sudden impulse, and with a
guilty backward glance, she bent and touched her lips to his forehead.
She drew back quickly, her face flooded with color, caught her breath,
then, drawing her hood over her head, went swiftly to the door and was
swallowed up in the darkness.