Way Down East Part 16

She was gone--David, who had been stunned by his father's words, ran after her, but the whirling flakes had hidden every trace of her, and the howling wind drove back his cry of "Anna, Anna! come back!"

Anna did not feel the cold after closing the door between her and the Squire's family; the white flame of her wrath seemed to burn up the blood in her veins, as she plunged through the snowdrifts, unconscious of the cold and storm. She had no words in which to formulate her fury at the indignity of her treatment. Her native sweetness, for the moment, had been extinguished and she was but the incarnation of wronged womanhood, crying aloud to high Heaven for justice.

The blood throbbed at her brain and the quickened circulation warmed her till she loosened the cloak at her throat and wondered, in a dazed sort of way, why she had put it on on such a stifling night. Then she remembered the snow and eagerly uplifted her flushed cheeks that the falling flakes might cool them.

But of the icy grip of the storm she was wholly unconscious. There was a mad exhilaration in facing the wild elements on such a night, the exertion of forcing through the storm chimed in with her mood; each snowdrift through which she fought her way was so much cruel injustice beaten down. She felt that she had the strength and courage to walk to the end of the earth and she went on and on, never thinking of the storm, or her destination, or where she would rest that night. Her head felt light, as if she had been drinking wine, and more than once she stopped to mop the perspiration from her forehead. How absurd for the snow to fall on such a sultry night, and foolish of those people who had turned her out to die, thinking it was cold--the thermometer must be 100. She paused to get her breath; a blast of icy wind caught her cape, and almost succeeded in robbing her of it, and the chill wrestled with the fever that was consuming her, and she realized for the first time that it was cold.

"Well, what next?" she asked herself, throwing back her head and unconsciously a.s.suming the att.i.tude of a creature brought to bay but still unconquered.

"What next?" She repeated it with the dull despair of one who has nothing further to fear in the way of suffering. The Fates had spent themselves on her, she no longer had the power to respond. Suppose she should become lost in a snowdrift? "Well, what did it matter?"

Then came one of those unaccountable clearings of the mental vision that nature seems to reserve for the final chapter. Her quickened brain grasped the tragedy of her life as it never had before. She saw it with impersonal eyes. Anna Moore was a stranger on whose case she could sit with unbiased judgment. Her mind swung back to the football game in the golden autumn eighteen months ago, and she heard the cheers and saw the swarms of eager, upturned faces and the dots of blue and crimson, like flowers, in a great waving field. What a panorama of life, and force, and struggle it had been! How typical of life, and the end--but no, the end was not yet; there must be some justice in life, some law of compensation. G.o.d must hear at last!

The wind came tearing down from, the pine forest, surging through the hills till it became a roar. Ah, it had sounded like that at the game.

They had called "Rah, Rah Sanderson" till they were hoa.r.s.e, "Sanderson, Rah! Sander-son! Rah! Rah!" The crackling forest seemed to have gone mad with the echo of his name. It had become the keynote of the wind. Rah! Rah! Sanderson!

"You can't escape him even in death" something seemed to whisper in her ear. "Ha-ha, Sanderson, San-der-son." She put her hands to her ears to shut out the hateful sound, but she heard it, like the wail of a lost soul; this time faint and far off: Sander-son--San-der-son. It was above her in the groaning, creaking branches of the trees, in the falling snow, in the whipping wind, the mockery would not be stilled.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, howled the wind, then sinking to a sigh, San-der-son--San-der-son.

The cold had begun to strike into the marrow. She moved as if her limbs were weighted. There was a mist gathering before her eyes, and she put up her hand and tried to brush it away, but it remained. She felt as if she were carrying something heavy in her arms and as she walked it grew heavier and heavier. To her wandering mind it took a pitifully familiar shape. Ah, yes! She knew what it was now; it was the baby, and she must not let it get cold. She must cover it with her cape and press it close to her bosom to keep it warm, but it was so far, so far, and it was getting heavier every moment.

And the wind continued to wail its dirge of "San-der-son, San-der-son."

She went through the motion of covering up the baby's head; she did not want it to waken and hear that awful cry. She lifted up her empty arms and lowered her head to soothe the imaginary baby with a kiss, and was shocked to feel how cold its little cheek had grown. She hurried on and on. She would beg the Squire to let his wife take it in for just a minute, to warm it. She would not ask to come in herself, but the baby--no one would be so cruel as to refuse her that. It would die out here in the cold and the storm. It was so cruel, so hard to be wandering about on a night like this with the baby. Her eyes began to fill with tears, and her lower lip to quiver, but she plodded on, sometimes gaining a few steps and then retracing them, but always with the same instinct that had spurred her on to efforts beyond her strength, and this done, she had no further concern for herself. Her body especially, where the cape did not protect it against the blast, was freezing, s.h.i.+vering, aching all over. A latent consciousness began to dawn as the dread presence of death drew nearer; some intuitive effort of preservation a.s.serted itself, and she kept repeating over and over: "I must not give up. I must not give up."

Presently the scene began to change, and the white formless world about her began to a.s.sume definite shape. She had seen it all before, the bare trees pointing their naked branches upward, the fringe of willows, the smooth, gla.s.sy sheet of water that was partly frozen and partly undulating toward the southern sh.o.r.e. The familiarity of it all began to haunt her. Had she dreamed it--was she dreaming now? Perhaps it was only a dream after all! Then, as if in a wave of clear thought, she remembered it all. It was the lake, and she had been there with the Sunday school children last summer on their picnic.

It came to her like a solution of all her troubles; it was so placid, so still, so cold. A moment and all would be forgotten. She stood with one foot on the creaking ice. It was but to walk a dozen steps to the place where the ice was but a crash of crystal and that would end it all. She was so weary of the eternal strife of things, she was so glad to lay down the burden under which her back was bending to the point of breaking.

And yet, there was the primitive instinct of self-preservation combating her inclination, urging her on to make one more final effort.

Back and forth, through the snow about the lake she wandered; without being able to decide. Her strength was fast ebbing. Which--which, should it be? "G.o.d have mercy!" she cried, and fell unconscious.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE NIGHT IN THE SNOWSTORM.

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven."--_Emerson_.

All through that long, wild night David searched and shouted, to find only snow and silence.

Through the darkness and the falling flakes he could not see more than a foot ahead, and when he would stumble over a stone or the fallen trunk of a tree, he would stoop down and search through the drifts with his bare hands, thinking perhaps that she might have fallen, and not finding her, he would again take up his fruitless search, while cold fear gnawed at his heart.

At home in the warm farm house, sat the Squire who had done his duty.

The consciousness of having done it, however, did not fill him with that cheerful glow of righteousness that is the reward of a good conscience--on the contrary, he felt small. It might have been imagination, but he felt, somehow, as if his wife and Kate were shunning him. Once he had tried to take his wife's hand as she stood with her face pressed to the window trying to see if she could make out the dim outline of David returning with Anna, but she withdrew her hand impatiently as she had never done in the thirty years of their married life. Amasy's hardness was a thing no longer to be condoned.

Furthermore, when the clock had struck eleven and then twelve, and yet no sign of David or Anna, the Squire had reached for his fur cap and announced his intention of "going to look for 'em." But like the proverbial worm, the wife of his bosom had turned, and with all the determination of a white rabbit she announced:

"If I was you, Amasy, I'd stay to hum; seems as if you had made almost enough trouble for one day." With the old habit of authority, strong as ever, he looked at the worm, but there was a light in its eyes that warned him as a danger signal.

They were alone together, the Squire and his wife, and each was alone in sorrow, the yoke of severity she had bowed beneath for thirty years uncomplainingly galled to-night. It had sent her boy out into the storm--perhaps to his death. There was little love in her heart for Amasy.

He tried to think that he had only done his duty, that David and Anna would come back, and that, in the meantime, Louisa was less a comfort to him, in his trouble, than she had ever been before. It was, of course, his trouble; it never occurred to him that Louisa's heart might have been breaking on its own account.

The Squire found that duty was a cold comforter as the wretched hours wore on.

Sanderson had slunk from the house without a word immediately after Anna's departure. In the general upheaval no one missed him, and when they did it was too late for them to enjoy the comfort of s.h.i.+fting the blame to his guilty shoulders.

The professor followed Kate with the mute sympathy of a faithful dog; he did not dare attempt to comfort her. The sight of a woman in tears unnerved him; he would not have dared to intrude on her grief; he could only wait patiently for some circ.u.mstance to arise in which he could be of a.s.sistance. In the meantime he did the only practical thing within his power--he went about from time to time, poked the fires and put on coal.

Marthy would have liked to discuss the iniquity of Lennox Sanderson with any one--it was a subject on which she could have spent hours--but no one seemed inclined to divert Marthy conversationally. In fact, her popularity was not greater that night in the household than that of the Squire. She spent her time in running from room to room, exclaiming hysterically:

"Land sakes! Ain't it dreadful?"

The tension grew as time wore on without developments of any kind, the waiting with the haunting fear of the worst grew harder to bear than absolute calamity.

Toward five o'clock the Squire announced his intention of going out and continuing the search, and this time no one objected. In fact, Mrs.

Bartlett, Kate and the professor insisted on accompanying him and Marthy decided to go, too, not only that she might be able to say she was on hand in case of interesting developments, but because she was afraid to be left in the house alone.

Toward morning, David, spent and haggard, wandered into a little maple-sugar shed that belonged to one of the neighbors. Smoke was coming out of the chimney, and David entered, hoping that Anna might have found here a refuge.

He was quickly undeceived, however, for Lennox Sanderson stood by the hearth warming his hands. The men glared at each other with the instinctive fierceness of panthers. Not a word was spoken; each knew that the language of fists could be the only medium of communication between them; and each was anxious to have his say out.

The men faced each other in silence, the flickering glare of the firelight painting grotesque expressions on their set faces. David's greater bulk loomed unnaturally large in the uncertain light, while every trained muscle of Sanderson's athletic body was on the alert.

It was the world old struggle between patrician and proletarian.

Sanderson was an all-round athlete and a boxer of no mean order. This was not his first battle. His quick eye showed him from David's awkward att.i.tude, that his opponent was in no way his equal from a scientific standpoint. He looked for the easy victory that science, nine times out of ten, can wrest from unskilled brute force.

For, perhaps, half a minute the combatants stood thus.

Then, with lowered head and outstretched arms, David rushed in.

Sanderson side-stepped, avoiding the on-set. Before David could recover himself, the other had sent his left fist cras.h.i.+ng into the country-man's face.

The blow was delivered with all the trained force the athlete possessed and sent David reeling against the rough wall of the house.

Such a blow would have ended the fight then and there for an ordinary man; but it only served to rouse David's sluggish blood to white heat.

Again he rushed.

This time he was more successful.