Part 75 (1/2)

Still, I shall remain here to-night. Johanna's gone home, I believe.

There's only one thing, the deepest yearning of my heart, John; but before I ask that boon, I want you to know, John, that I acknowledge my sin! my awful, awful sin of years! O my G.o.d! my G.o.d! why did I do it?”

Parson Tombs wept again. ”He's confessed everything, John,” he said with eager tenderness.

”G.o.d knows,” responded Garnet, ”G.o.d knows I never concealed it but to save others from misery! and while I concealed it I could not master it!

Now I have purged my sin-blackened soul of all its hideous secret and evil purpose! The thorn in my flesh is plucked out and I cast myself on the mercy of G.o.d and the charity of his people!”

”Pra-aise Gawd!” murmured Parson Tombs, ”no sinneh eveh done that in va-ain!”

”O John,” moaned Garnet, ”G.o.d only knows what I've suffered and must suffer! But it's all right! all right! I pray He may lop off every unfruitful branch of my life--honors, possessions--till nothing is left but Rosemont, the lowly work He called me to, Himself! Let Him make me as one of his hired servants! But, John,” he continued while March stood dumb with wonder at his swift loss of subtlety, ”I want you to know also that I feel no resentment--I cannot--O I cannot--against her who shares my guilt and shame!”

”Great Heaven!” murmured March, with a start as if to turn away.

”No, thank G.o.d! her vanity and jealousy can drive me to no more misdeeds! She made me send Mademoiselle Eglantine to Europe, when she knew I had to sell her husband's stock in both companies to bribe the woman to go! John, the cause of her betraying me to him at last was my faithful refusal to break off my engagement with your mother!”

”Major Garnet, I prefer----”

”Will you tell your mother that, John? It's the one thing you can do for me! Tell her I beseech her in the name of a love----”

”Stop!” murmured March in a voice that quivered with repulsion.

”--A love that has dared all, and lost all, for hers----”

”Stop!” said John again, and Garnet turned a beseeching eye upon the pastor.

”John,” tearfully said the old man, ”let us not yield to ow feelings when the cry of a soul in s.h.i.+pwreck”--he stopped to swallow his emotions. ”Ow penitent brother on'y asks you to bear his message. It's natu'al he should cling to the one pyo tie that holds him to us. O John, 'in wrath remembeh mercy!' An' yet you may be the nearest right, G.o.d knows! O brethren, let's kneel and ask Him faw equal love an' wisdom!”

Garnet rose to kneel, but March put out a protesting hand. ”I wouldn't do that, sir.” The tone was gentle, almost compa.s.sionate. ”I don't suppose G.o.d would strike you dead, but--I wouldn't do it, sir.” He turned to go, and, glancing back unexpectedly, saw on Garnet's face a look so evil that it haunted him for years.

LXXVIII.

BARBARA FINDS THE RHYME

Barbara walked along the slender road in front of Rosemont's grove. The sun was gone. Her father had not arrived yet with Johanna, but she questioned every stir of the air for the sound of their coming. A yearning which commonly lay very still in her bosom and ought in these two long years to have got reconciled to its lovely prison, was up once more in silent mutiny.

With slow self-compulsion she turned toward the house. The dim, vacated dormitories grew large against the fading after-glow. The thrush's song ceased. Remotely from the falling slope beyond the unlighted house the voices of a negro boy and girl, belated in the milking-pen, came to her ear more lightly than the gurgle of the shallow creek so near her feet. Suddenly the cry of the whip-Will's-widow filled the grove--”whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow!”--in headlong importunity until the whole air sobbed and quivered with the overcharge of its melancholy pa.s.sion. Then as abruptly it was hushed, the echoes died, and Barbara, at the grove gate, recalled the other twilight hour, a counterpart of this in all but its sadness, when, on this spot, she had bidden John March come the next day to show Widewood to Henry Fair.

And now Henry Fair ”some day soon,” his unexpected letter said, was to come again. And she was letting him come. One of his sweet mother's letters--always so welcome--had ever so delicately hinted a hope that she would do so, the fond mother affectionately imputing to the father's wisdom the feeling that Henry's present life contained more uncertainties than were good for his, or anyone's, future. He was coming at last for her final word, and in her meditations, his patient constancy, like a great amba.s.sador, pleaded mightily in advance.

Henry Fair, gentle, strong, and true, will come; _the other_ never comes. The explanation is very simple; she has made it to Johanna twice within the year: a strained relation--it happens among the best of men--between him and Rosemont's master. Besides, Mr. March, she says, visits nowhere. He is, as Fannie herself testifies, more completely out of all Suez's little social eddies than even the overtasked young mistress of Rosemont, and does nothing day or night but buffet the flood of his adversities. As she reminds herself of these things now, she recalls Fannie's praise of his ”indomitable pluck,” and feels a new, warm courage around her own heart. For as long as men can show valor, she gravely reflects, surely women can have fort.i.tude. How small a right, at best--how little honest room--there is in this huge world of strifes and sorrows for a young girl's heart to go breaking itself with its own grief and longing.

The right thing is, of course, to forget. She should! She must! But--she has said so every evening and morning for two years. Old man! old woman!

do you remember what two years meant when you were in the early twenties? Even yet, with the two years gone, by hard crowding of the hours with cares, as a s.h.i.+p crowds sail or steam, it seems at times as if her forgetting were about to make headway; but just then the unexpected happens--merely the unexpected. O why not the romantic? She hears him praised or blamed; or, as now, he is ill; or she meets him in a dream; or between midnight and dawn she cannot sleep; or, worst of all, by some sad mischance she sees him, close by, in a throng or in a public way--for an instant--and, when it is too late, knows by his remembered look that he wanted to speak; and the flood lifts and sweeps her back, and she must begin again. The daylight hours are the easiest; there is so much to do and see done, and just the clear, lost, silent-hearted mother's ways to follow. One can manage everything but the twilights with their death of day, their hush of birds, the mind gazing back into the past and the heart asking unanswerable questions of the future. For the evenings there are books, though not all; especially not Herrick, any more; nor Tennyson, for it opens of itself at ”Mariana,” who wept, ”I am aweary, aweary. Oh, G.o.d, that I were dead!”

Barbara walked again. Moving at a slow pace, so, one can more soberly--She heard wheels. A quarter of a mile away they rumbled on a small bridge and were unheard again, and while she still listened to hear them on the ground others sounded on the bridge. She hurried back to the steps of the house and had hardly reached them when Johanna drove into the grove and Fannie's voice called,

”Is that you, Barb?”