For an hour her voice droned steadily in the firelight, while Molly, with her head against Mrs. Gay"s knee, looked through the cas.e.m.e.nt window to where the October roses bloomed and dropped in the squares of the Italian garden. Then at the sound of hurried footsteps on the walk outside, the girl rose from the ottoman and went out, closing the door after her. In the hall the blanched face of Uncle Abednego confronted her like the face of a spectre.
"I ain"t a-gwine ter tell Miss Angela--I ain"t a-gwine ter tell Miss Angela," he moaned, "Ma.r.s.e Jonathan, he"s been shot down yonder at Poplar Spring des like Ole Marster!"
CHAPTER XV
GAY DISCOVERS HIMSELF
As Gay pa.s.sed rapidly down the Haunt"s Walk a rustle in the witch-hazel bushes accompanied him, stopping instantly when he stopped, and beginning again when he moved, as though something, crouching there, listened in breathless suspense for the fall of his footsteps. At the Poplar Spring the sound grew so distinct that he hastened in the direction of it, calling in an impatient voice, "Blossom! Are you there, Blossom?" The words were still on his lips, when a thick grape-vine parted in front of him, and the bearded immobile face of Abner Revercomb looked out at him, with hatred in his eyes.
"d.a.m.n you!" said a voice almost in a whisper. The next instant a shot rang out, and Gay stumbled forward as though he had tripped over the underbrush, while his gun, slipping from his shoulder, discharged its load into the air. His first confused impression was that he had knocked against a poplar bough which had stuck him sharply in the side. Then, as a small drift of smoke floated toward him, he thought in surprise, "I"m shot. By Jove, that"s what it means--I"m shot." At the instant, underlying every other sensation or idea, there was an ironic wonder that anybody should have hated him enough to shoot him. But while the wonder was still engrossing him--in that same instant, which seemed to cover an eternity, when the shot rang in his ears, something happened in his brain, and he staggered through the curtain of grape-vine and sank down as though falling asleep on the bed of life-everlasting. "It"s ridiculous that anybody should want to shoot me," he thought, while the little round yellow sun dwindled smaller and smaller until a black cloud obscured it.
A minute, or an hour afterwards, he opened his eyes with a start, and lay staring up at the sky, where a flock of swallows drifted like smoke in the cloudless blue. He had awakened to an odd sensation of floating downward on a current that was too strong for him; and though he knew that the idea was absurd, it was impossible for him to put it out of his mind, for when he made an effort to do so, he felt that he was slipping again into oblivion. For a time he let himself drift helplessly like a leaf on the stream. Then seized by a sudden terror of the gulf beyond, he tried to stop, to hold back, to catch at something--at anything--that would check the swiftness of his descent, that would silence the rushing sound of the river about him. But in spite of his struggles, this current--which seemed sometimes to flow from a wound in his side, and sometimes to be only the watery rustle of the aspens in the graveyard--this imaginary yet pitiless current, bore him always farther away from the thing to which he was clinging--from this thing he could not let go because it was himself--because it had separated and distinguished him from all other persons and objects in the universe.
"I"ve always believed I was one person," he thought, "but I am a mult.i.tude. There are at least a million of me--and any one of them might have crowded out all the others if he"d got a chance." A swift and joyous surprise held him for a moment, as though he were conscious for the first time of dormant possibilities in himself which he had never suspected. "Why didn"t I know this before?" he asked, like one who stumbles by accident upon some simple and yet illuminating fact of nature. "All this has been in me all the time, but n.o.body told me. I might just as well have been any of these other selves as the one I am." The noise of the river began in his head again, but it no longer frightened him.
"It"s only the hum of bees in the meadow," he said after a minute, "and yet it fills the universe as if it were the sound of a battle. And now I"ve forgotten what I was thinking about. It was very important, but I shall never remember it." He closed his eyes, while the ghostly fragrance of the life-everlasting on which he was lying rose in a cloud to envelop him. Something brushed his face like the touch of wings, and looking up he saw that it was a golden leaf which had fallen from a bough of the great poplar above him. He had never seen anything in his life so bright as that golden bough that hung over him, and when he gazed through it, he saw that the sky was bluer than he had ever imagined that it could be, and that everything at which he looked had not only this quality of intense, of penetrating brightness, but appeared transparent, with a luminous transparency which seemed a veil spread over something that was shining beyond it. "I wonder if I"m dead?" he thought irritably, "or is it only delirium? And if I am dead, it really doesn"t matter--an idiot could see through anything so thin as this."
Again the cloud closed over him, and again just as suddenly it lifted and the joyous surprise awoke in his mind. He remembered feeling the same sensation in his boyhood, when he had walked one morning at sunrise on a strange road, and had wondered what would happen when he turned a long curve he was approaching. And it seemed to him now as then, that a trackless, a virgin waste of experience surrounded him--that he was in the midst of an incalculable vastness of wonder and delight. It was a nuisance to have this web of flesh wrapping about him, binding his limbs, hindering his efforts, stifling his breath.
And then, as in the brain of a fevered and delirious man, this impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come. His ideas were perfectly independent of his will. He could neither recover one that he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber. Into this brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and ill-a.s.sorted company of players. He saw first a grotesque and indistinct figure, which he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, the elder Jonathan Gay, with his restless and suffering look; and after this the face of Kesiah, wearing her deprecation expression, which said, "It isn"t really my fault that I couldn"t change things"; and then the faces of women he had seen but once, or pa.s.sed in the street and remembered; and in the midst of these crowding faces, the scarred and ravaged face of an old crossing-sweeper on a windy corner in Paris. . . . "I wish they"d leave me alone," he thought, with the helplessness of delirium, "I wish they"d keep away and leave me alone." He wanted to drive these hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him. The loud hum of bees in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he might think things out--that he might even remember the important things he had forgotten. "Abner Revercomb shot me," he said aloud. "I don"t know much. I don"t know whether I am alive or dead. All I am certain of is that it doesn"t matter in the least--that it"s too small a fact to make any fuss about. It"s all so small--the blamed thing isn"t any more important than those bees humming out there in the meadow. And I might as well have developed into any one of my other selves. What were all those seeds of possibilities for if they never came to anything? Why, I might have been a hero--it was in me all the time--I might even have been a G.o.d."
Then for the first time he became aware of his body as of something outside of himself--something that had been tacked on to him. He felt all at once that his feet were as heavy as logs--that they were benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp p.r.i.c.king of thorns. Yet he had no control over them; he could not move them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself. This sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic insect. He knew it would reach his knees and then pa.s.s on to his waist, but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the action of his brain.
"I"m really out of my head," he thought, and the next instant, "or, it"s all a dream, and I"ve been only a dream from the beginning."
A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it looked beside the images of his delirium. An excited and eager humming was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow. From his waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into which he was drifting.
"Can you hear?" asked a voice from out the hum of sound, speaking in the clear, high tone one uses to a deaf man.
Another voice, he was not sure whether it was his own or a stranger"s--repeated from a distance, "Can I hear?"
"Did you see who shot you?" said the voice.
And the second voice repeated after it: "Did I see who shot me?"
"Was it Abner Revercomb?" asked the first voice.
He knew then what they meant, and suddenly he began to think lucidly and rapidly like a person under the mental pressure of strong excitement or of alcohol. Everything showed distinctly to him, and he saw with this wonderful distinctness, that it made no difference whether it was Abner Revercomb or one of his own mult.i.tude of selves that had shot him. It made no difference--nothing mattered except to regain the ineffable sense of approaching discovery which he had lost.
"Was it Abner Revercomb?" said the first voice more loudly.
He was conscious now of himself and of his surroundings, and there was no uncertainty, no hesitation in his answer.
"It was an accident. I shot myself," he said, and after a moment he added angrily, "Why should anybody shoot me? It would be ridiculous."
It was there again--the unexplored, the incalculable vastness. If they would only leave him alone he might recover it before it eluded him.
CHAPTER XVI
THE END
In the middle of the afternoon Molly went into the spare room in the west wing, and stopped beside the high white bed on which Gay was lying, with the sheet turned down from his face. In death his features wore a look of tranquil brightness, of arrested energy, as if he had paused suddenly for a brief s.p.a.ce, and meant to rise and go on again about the absorbing business of living. The windows were open, and through the closed shutters floated a pale greenish light and the sound of dead leaves rustling softly in the garden.
She had hardly entered before the door opened noiselessly again, and Kesiah came in bringing some white roses in a basket. Drawing a little away, Molly watched her while she arranged the flowers with light and guarded movements, as if she were afraid of disturbing the sleeper. Of what was she thinking? the girl wondered. Was she grieving for her lost youth, with its crushed possibilities of happiness, or for the rich young life before her, which had left its look of arrested energy still clinging to the deserted features? Was she saddened by the tragic mystery of Death or by the more poignant, the more inscrutable mystery of Life? Did she mourn all the things that had not been that did not matter, or all the things that had been that mattered even less?
Lifting her eyes from Kesiah"s face, she fixed them on a small old picture of the elder Jonathan, which hung under a rusty sword above the bed. For the first time there came to her an impulse of compa.s.sion for the man who was her father. Perhaps he, also, had suffered because life had driven him to do the things that he hated--perhaps he, also, had had his secret chamber in which his spirit was crucified? With the thought something in her heart, which was like a lump of ice, melted suddenly, and she felt at peace. "Because I"ve lived," she said softly to herself, "I can understand."
And on the opposite side of the bed, between the long white curtains, Kesiah was thinking, "Because I"ve never lived, but have stood apart and watched life, I can understand."
Turning away presently, Molly went to the door, where she stood waiting until the elder woman joined her.
"Is Mr. Chamberlayne still with Aunt Angela?" she asked.
"Yes. He was on his way to visit her when Cephus met him near the cross-roads." For an instant she paused to catch her breath, and then added softly, "Angela is bearing it beautifully."
Stooping over, she picked up a few scattered rose leaves from the threshold and dropped them into the empty basket before she followed Molly down the hall of the west wing to the lattice door, which opened on the side-garden. Here the rustling of dead leaves grew louder, and faint scents of decay and mould were wafted through the evanescent beauty of the Indian summer.
While they stood there, Mr. Chamberlayne came down the staircase, wiping his eyes, which were very red, on his white silk handkerchief.
"She bears it beautifully, just as we might have expected," he said "I have seldom witnessed such fort.i.tude, such saintly resignation to what she feels to be the will of G.o.d."
Molly"s eyes left his face and turned to the purple and gold of the meadows, where webs of silver thistledown were floating over the path she had trodden only a few hours ago. Nothing had changed in the landscape--the same fugitive bloom was on the fields, the same shadows were on the hillside, the same amber light was on the turnpike. She thought of many things in that instant, but beneath them all, like an undercurrent, ran the knowledge that Mrs. Gay was "bearing it beautifully" behind her closed shutters. When her mind went back to the past, she remembered the elder Jonathan, who had perished in the fine silken mesh of the influence he was powerless to break. After this came the memory of the day when Janet Merryweather had flung herself on the mercy of the gentle heart, and had found it iron. And then she thought of the son, who had drifted into deceit and subterfuge because he was not strong enough to make war on a thing so helpless. He, also, had died because he dared not throw off that remorseless tyranny of weakness.
Without that soft yet indomitable influence, he would never have lied in the beginning, would never have covered his faithlessness with the hypocrisy of duty.
"You have been a great comfort to her, Mr. Chamberlayne," said Kesiah, breaking the silence at last.
A low sound, half a sob, half a sigh, escaped the lawyer"s lips. "A spirit like hers needs no other prop than her Creator," he replied.
"It is when one expects her to break down that she shows her wonderful fort.i.tude," added Kesiah.
"Her consolation now is the thought that she never considered either her health or her happiness where her son was concerned," pursued the old man. "She clings pathetically to the memory that she urged him to return to Europe, and that he chose to remain a few weeks for the pleasure of hunting. Not a breath stains the purity of her utter selflessness. To witness such spiritual beauty is a divine inspiration."
For the last few hours, ever since a messenger had met him, half way on the Applegate road, with the news of Jonathan"s death, he had laboured philosophically to reconcile such a tragedy with his preconceived belief that he inhabited the best of all possible worlds. Only when suffering obtruded brutally into his immediate surroundings, was it necessary for him to set about resolving the problem of existence--for, like most hereditary optimists, he did not borrow trouble from his neighbours. A famine or an earthquake at a little distance appeared to him a puerile obstacle to put forward against his belief in the perfection of the planetary scheme; but when his eyes rested upon the martyred saintliness of Mrs. Gay"s expression, he was conscious that his optimism tottered for an instant, and was almost overthrown. That a just and tender Deity should inflict pain upon so lovely a being was incomprehensible to his chivalrous spirit.
"Has any one told her about Blossom?" asked Molly.
Kesiah shook her head. "Mr. Chamberlayne feels that it would be cruel.
She knows so little about Jonathan"s affairs that we may be able to keep his marriage from her knowledge if she leaves Jordan"s Journey a few days after the funeral."
"In spite of it all I know that Jonathan hated lies," said Molly almost fiercely.