With no further explanation she marched down the length of the
veranda—carrying herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily,
walking with that care which people show when they are not certain of
their ability to walk straight—and entered the house.
I didn’t know why she had gone; but I knew the worst was over. Though I
felt humiliation to the core of the heart’s core, I also felt relief.
With a foot dangling, I sat sidewise on the veranda rail and waited.
Glancing at my watch, I saw it was not yet four, and I had lived through
years since I had climbed the hill at one. My sensations were comparable
only to those of the man who has been on trial for his life and is
waiting for the verdict.
I waited nervously, and yet humbly. Now that it was all over, it seemed
to me that the bitterness of death was past. Whatever else I should have
to go through in life, nothing could equal the past quarter of an hour.
The sensations I hadn’t had while making my confession began to come to
me by degrees. Looking back over the chasm I had crossed, I was amazed
to think I had had the nerve for it. I trembled reminiscently; the cold
sweat broke out on my forehead. It was terrible to think that at that
very minute she was in there weighing the evidence, against me and in my
favor.
Mechanically I relighted the cigar that had gone out. Against me and
in my favor! I was not blind to the fact that in my favor there was
something. I had gone down, but I had also struggled up again; and you
can make an appeal for the man who has done that.
She was long in coming back. I glanced at my watch, and it was nearly
half past four. Her weighing of the evidence had taken her half an hour,
and it was evidently not over yet. Well, juries were often slow in
coming to a verdict; and doubtless she was balancing the extenuating
circumstance that I had struggled up against the main fact that I had
gone down.
What she considered her ideal had during the past few weeks been
gradually transferring itself from her mind to my own. She wouldn’t marry
a man she couldn’t trust; she wouldn’t marry a man who hadn’t what she
called spirit; she wouldn’t marry a milksop. But she had well-defined—and
yet indefinable—conceptions as to how far in spirit a man should go, and
of the difference between being a milksop and a man of honor. She might
find it hard to admit that the pendulum of human impulse that swung far
in one direction might swing equally far in the other; and therein would
lie my danger.
But I must soon know. It was ten minutes of five. The jury had been out
more than three-quarters of an hour.
A new quality was being transmuted into the atmosphere. It was as if the
lightest, flimsiest veil had been flung across the sun. In the distant
glinting of the sea, which had been silver, there came a tremulous shade
of gold. The foxgloves bowed themselves like men at prayer. The robins
betook themselves to the branches. From unseen depths of the scrub-oak
there was an occasional luscious trill, as the time for the singing of
birds wasn’t over yet.
Round me there was silence. I might have been sitting at the door of an
empty house. I listened intently for the sound of returning footsteps,
but none came.
At a quarter past five a chill about the heart began to strike me. I had
been waiting more than an hour. Could it be possible that...?
It would be the last degree of insult. Whatever she did, she wouldn’t
subject me to that. It would be worse than her glove across the face.
It was out of the question. I couldn’t bear to think of it. Rather than
think of it, I went over the probabilities that she would come back with
the smile of forgiveness. It would doubtless be a tearful smile, for
tears were surely the cause of her delay. When she had controlled them,
when she was able to speak and bid me be of good comfort, I should hear
the tap of her high heels coming down the uncarpeted stairway. No red
Indian ever listened for the tread of a maid’s moccasins on forest moss
so intently as I for that staccato click.
But only the birds rewarded me, and the cries of boys who had come to
bathe on the beach below. There was more gold in the light; more trilling
in the branches; a more pungent scent from the trees, the flowers, and
the grass; and that was all.
It was half past five; it was a quarter to six; it was six.
At six o’clock I knew.
My hat was lying on a chair near by. I picked it up—and went.
I went, not by the avenue and the path, but down the queer, rickety
flights of steps that led from one jutting rock to another over the face
of the cliff, till I reached the beach. It was a broad, whitish, sandy
beach, with a quietly lapping tide almost at the full. Full tide was
marked a few feet farther up by a long, wavy line of seaweed and other
jetsam.
It was the delicious hour for bathing. As far as one could see in either
direction there were heads bobbing in the water and people scrambling
in and out. Shrill cries of women and children, hoarse shouts of men,
mingled with the piping of birds overhead. Farther out than the bathers
there were rowboats, and beyond the rowboats sails. In the middle of
the Sound a steamer or two trailed a lazy flag of smoke. Far, far to the
south and the west a haze like that round a volcano hung over New York. I
should return there next day to face new conditions. I only wished to God
that it could be that night.
The new conditions were, briefly, three: I could use the revolver still
lying in my desk; or I could begin to drink again; or, like the bull
wounded in the ring, I could seek shelter in the dumb sympathy of the
Down and Out.
The last seemed to me the least attractive. I had climbed that hill, and
found it led only to a precipice that I had fallen over.
Neither did the first possibility charm me especially. Apart from the
horror of it, it was too brief, too sudden, too conclusive. I wanted the
gradual, the prolonged.
It was the second course to which my mind turned with the nearest
approach to satisfaction. Christian had told me that some of my severest
tussles lay ahead; and now I had come to the one in which I should go
under. In that the flesh at least would get its hour of compensation,
when all was said and done.
At the foot of Mrs. Grace’s steps I paused to recall Christian’s words of
a few days previously:
“In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the
patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and
meet all needs.”
I had tried that—love and truth together!—and at the result I could only
laugh.
My immediate fear was lest Mrs. Grace and the Grahams would be on the
veranda, vaguely expecting to offer me their congratulations. When
half-way up the steps I heard voices and knew that they were there. So be
it! I had faced worse things in my life; and now I could face that.
But as I advanced up the lawn I saw them moving about and talking with
animation. As soon as Mrs. Grace caught sight of me she hurried down
the steps, meeting me as I passed among the flower-beds. She held a
newspaper marked Extra in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten that I
had love-affairs.
“Have you seen this? Colt, the chauffeur, was at the station and brought
it back. It’s just come down from New York.”
Glad of anything that would distract attention from myself, I took the
paper in my hand and pretended to be reading it. All I got was the
vague information that some one had been assassinated—some man and his
morganatic wife. What did it matter to me? What did it matter to any one?
Of all that was printed there, only five syllables took possession of my
memory—and that because they were meaningless, “Gavrilo Prinzip!”
I was repeating them to myself as I handed the paper back, and we
exchanged comments of which I have no recollection. More comments were
passed with the Grahams, and then, blindly, drunkenly, I made my way to
my room.
There I found nothing to do less classic than to sit at the open window,
to look over at the red-and-yellow house on the opposite hill. It was
my intention to think the matter out, but my brain seemed to have
stopped working. Nothing came to me but those barbaric sounds, that kept
repeating themselves with a kind of hiss: “Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo
Prinzip!”
From my stupefied scanning of the paper I hadn’t grasped the fact that
a name utterly unknown that morning was being flashed round the world
at a speed more rapid than that of the earth round the sun. Still less
did I suspect that it was to become in its way the most sinister name in
history. I kept repeating it only as you repeat senseless things in the
minutes before you go to sleep.
“Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”
_CHAPTER XVII_