The Side Of The Angels Part 42

She thought about that. After all, it was the thing most practical. The other impulses were not practical. She knew that, of course. She could humiliate herself to the dust without affecting him. Up to to-day she had not wanted him to suffer; but now she did. If she killed herself, he _would_ suffer. However long he lived, or however many servants the woman he married would be able to keep, his life would be poisoned by the memory of what he had done to her.

Her imagination reveled in the scenes it was now able to depict. Leaning back with her head resting against the trunk of the old oak, she closed her eyes and viewed the dramatic procession of events that might follow on that morning and haunt Claude Masterman to his grave. She saw herself leaping from the rock; she saw her body washed ash.o.r.e, her head and hands hanging limp, her long, wet hair streaming; she saw her parents mourning, and Thor remorseful, and Claude absolutely stricken. Her efforts rested there. Everything was subordinate to the one great fact that by doing this she could make the sword go through his heart. She went to the edge of the cliff and peered over. Though it was a sheer fifty feet, it didn't seem so very far down. The water was blue and lapping and inviting. It looked as if it would be easy.

She returned to her seat. She knew she was only playing. It relieved the tumult within her to pretend that she could do as desperately as she felt. It quieted her. Once she saw that she had it in her power to make Claude unhappy, something in her spirit was appeased.

She began the little comedy all over again, from the minute when she started forth from home on the momentous day to fill her pan with raspberries. She traced her steps down the hill and up through the glades of the bluff wherever the ripe raspberries were hanging. She came to the minute when her stage directions called for "Lord Gregory," and she sang it with the same thin, silvery piping which was all she could contribute now to the demand of drama. It was both an annoyance and a surprise to hear a footfall and the swish of robes and to turn and see Lois Willoughby.

Beyond the fact that she couldn't help it, she didn't know why she became at once so taciturn and repellent. "Oh, she'll come again," she said in self-excuse, and with vague ideas of atonement, after Lois had gone away. Besides, the things that Lois had said in the way of solicitude, sympathy, and G.o.d made no appeal to her. If she felt regret it was from obscure motives of compa.s.sion, since this woman, too, had missed what was best in love.

She would have returned to her dream had her dream returned to her; but Lois had broken the spell. Rosie could no longer get the ecstasies of re-enactment. Re-enactment itself became a foolish thing, the husk of what had once been fruit. It was a new phase of loss. Everything went but her misery and her desire to strike at Claude--that and the sense that whatever she did, and no matter how elusive she made herself, she would have to go back to the old life at last. She struggled against the conviction, but it settled on her like a mist. She played again with the raspberry-bine, she sang "Lord Gregory," she peered over the brink of the toy precipice--but she evoked nothing. She stood as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared, whipping and lashing and taunting her imagination by the rashness of the act. Nothing came but the commonplace suggestion that even if she fell in, the boat which had appeared on the lake, and from which two men were fishing, would rescue her. The worst she would get would be a wetting and perhaps a cold. She wouldn't drown.

Common sense took possession of her. The thing for her to do, it told her cruelly, was to go back and pick the cuc.u.mbers. After that there would be some other job. In the market-garden business jobs were endless, especially in spring. She could set about them with a better heart since, after all that had happened, Archie Masterman couldn't refuse now to renew the lease. He wouldn't have the face to refuse it--so common sense expressed itself--when his son had done her such a wrong. If she had scored no other victory, her suffering would at least have secured that.

It was an argument of which she couldn't but feel the weight. There would be three more years of just managing to live--three more years of sowing and planting and watering and watching, at the end of which they would not quite have starved, while Matt would have had a hole in which to hide himself on coming out of jail. Decidedly it was an argument. She had already shown her willingness to sell herself; and this would apparently prove to be her price.

Wearily, when noon had pa.s.sed and afternoon set in, she got herself to her feet. Wearily she began to descend the hill. She would go back again to the cuc.u.mbers. She would take up again the burden she had thrown down. She would bring her wild heart into harness and tame it to hopelessness. Common sense could suggest nothing else.

She went now by the path, because it was tortuous and less direct than the bee-line over fern. She paused at every excuse--now to watch a robin hopping, now to look at a pink lady's-slipper abloom in a bed of spleenwort, now for no reason at all. Each step cost her a separate act of renunciation; each act of renunciation was harder than the other. But successive steps and successive acts brought her down the hill at last.

"I can't. I can't."

She dragged herself a few paces farther still.

"I can't! I can't!"

She was in sight of the boulevard, where a gang of Finns were working, and beyond which lay the ragged, uncultivated outskirts of her father's land. Up through a tangle of nettles and yarrow she could see the zigzag path which had been the rainbow bridge of her happiness. She came to a dead stop, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth fearfully. "If I go up there," she said to herself, "I shall never come down again."

She meant that she would never come down again in the same spirit. That spirit would be captured and slain. She herself would be captured and slain. Nothing would live of her but a body to drudge in the hothouse to earn a few cents a day.

Suddenly, without forming a resolution or directing an intention, she turned and sped up the hill. At first she only walked rapidly; but the walk broke into a run, and the run into a swift skimming along through the trees like that of a roused partridge.

And yet she didn't know what she was running from. Something within her, a power of guardedness or that capacity for common sense which had made its last desperate effort to get the upper hand, had broken down. All she could yield to was the terror that paralyzed thought; all she could respond to was the force that drew her up the hill with its awful fascination. "I must do it, I must," were the words with which she met her own impulse to resist. If her confused thought could have become explanatory it would have said: "I must get away from the life I've known, from the care, from the hope, from the love. I must do something that will make Claude suffer; I must frighten him; I must wound him; I must strike at the girl who has won him away with her ten or twelve servants. And there's no way but this."

Even so the way was obscure to her. She was taking it without seeing whither it was to lead. If one impulse warned her to stop, another whipped her onward. "I can't stop! I can't stop!" she cried out, when warning became alarm.

For flight gave impetus to itself. It was like release; it was a kind of wild glee. She was as a bird whose wings have been bound, and who has worked them free again. There was a frenzy in sheer speed.

The path was steep, but she was hardly aware of so much as touching it.

Fear behind and anguish within her carried her along. She scarcely knew that she was running breathlessly, that she panted, that once or twice she stumbled and fell. Something was beckoning to her from the great, safe, empty void--something that was nothing, unless it was peace and sleep--something that had its abode in the free s.p.a.ces of the wind and the blue caverns of the sky and the kindly lapping water--something infinite and eternal and restful, in whose embrace she was due.

At the edge of the wood she had a last terrifying moment. The raspberry-bine was there, and the great oak with the seat around it, and the carpet of cinquefoil and wild strawberry. She gave them a quick, frightened look, like an appeal to impede her. If she was to stop she must stop now. "But I can't stop," she seemed to fling to them, over her shoulder, as she kept on to where, beyond the highest tip of greensward, the blue level of the lake appeared.

The boat with the two fishermen was nearer the sh.o.r.e than when she had observed it last. "They'll save me! Oh, they'll save me!" she had time to whisper to herself, at the supreme moment when she left everything behind.

There followed a s.p.a.ce which in Rosie's consciousness was long. She felt that she was leaping, flying, out into the welcoming void, and that the promise of rest and peace had not deceived her.

But it was in the shock of falling that sanity returned; and all that the tense little creature had been, and tried to be, and couldn't be, and longed to be, and feared to be, and failed to be broke into a cry at which the fishermen dropped their rods.

CHAPTER XXVI

"Thor, would you mind if I went away for a little while?"

He looked at her across the luncheon-table, but her eyes were downcast.

Though she endeavored to maintain the non-committal att.i.tude she had taken up at breakfast, she couldn't meet his gaze.

"If you went away!" he echoed, blankly. "Why should you do that?"

"I've been to see--" She found a difficulty in p.r.o.nouncing the name--"I've been to see Rosie. She's rather--upset."

Under the swift lifting of her lids he betrayed his self-consciousness.

"I suppose so." He kept to the most laconic form of speech in order to leave no opening to her penetration.

"And I thought if I could take her away--"

"Where should you go?"

"Oh, anywhere. That wouldn't matter. To New York, perhaps. That might interest her. But anywhere, so long as--"

He got out his consent while making an excuse for rising from the table.

The conversation was too difficult to sustain. It was without looking at him that she said, as he was leaving the room:

"Then I'll go and ask her at once. I dare say she won't come--but I can try. It will give me an excuse for going back. I feel worried at having left her at all."

Between three and four that afternoon she entered her husband's office hurriedly. It was Mrs. Dearlove who received her. "Do you know where Dr.

Masterman is? Do you know where he expected to call this afternoon?"

Brightstone consulted a card hanging on the wall. "He was to 'ave seen Mrs. Gibbs, 'm--Number 10 Susan Street--some time through the day."

Lois made no secret of her agitation. "Have they a telephone?"

"Oh, no, 'm; 'ardly. Only a poor charwoman."

"Was he going anywhere at all where they _could_ have a telephone?"

Mrs. Dearlove having mentioned the possibilities, Lois rang up house after house. She left the same message everywhere: Thor was to be asked to come directly to his office, where she was awaiting him. It was after four when he appeared.

She met him in the little entry and, taking him by the arm, drew him into the waiting-room. "Come in, Thor dear, come in." She knew by his eyes that he suspected something of what she had to tell.

"Caught me at the Longyears'," he tried to say in a natural voice, but he could hardly force the words beyond his lips.

"It's Rosie, Thor," she said, instantly. "She's _all_ right."

He dropped into a chair, supporting himself on the round table strewn with ill.u.s.trated papers and magazines for the entertainment of waiting patients. His lips moved, but no sound pa.s.sed them. Long, dark shadows streaked the pallor of his face.