To come upon the street again was like the confused awakening from a dream. With the first few steps Jessica found herself shivering in an extremity of cold, yet still uncomfortably warm. A sudden passing spasm of giddiness, too, made her head swim so that for the instant she feared to fall. Then, with an added sense of weakness, she went on, wearily and desponding.
The recollection of this novel and curious happiness upon which she had stumbled only a few moments before took on now the character of self-reproach. The burning headache had returned, and with it came a pained consciousness that it had been little less than criminal in her to weakly dally in Horace’s office when such urgent responsibility rested upon her outside. If the burden of this responsibility appeared too great for her to bear, now that her strength seemed to be so strangely leaving her, there was all the more reason for her to set her teeth together, and press forward, even if she staggered as she went.
Only—where to find Reuben Tracy! The search had been made cruelly hopeless by that shameful delay; and she blamed herself with fierceness for it, as she racked her brain for some new plan, wondering whether she ought to have asked Horace or gone into some of the other offices.
There were groups of men standing here and there on the comers—a little away from the full light of the street-lamps, as if unwilling to court observation. These knots of workmen had a sinister significance to her feverish mind. She had the clew to the terrible mischief which some of them intended—which no doubt even now they were canvassing in furtive whispers—and only Tracy could stop it, and she was powerless to find him!
There came slouching along the sidewalk, as she grappled with this anguish of irresolution, a slight and shabby figure which somehow arrested her attention. It was a familiar enough figure—that of old “Cal” Gedney; and there was nothing unusual or worthy of comment in the fact that he was walking unsteadily by himself, with his gaze fixed intently on the sidewalk. He had passed again out of the range of her cursory glance before she suddenly remembered that he was a lawyer, and even some kind of a judge.
She turned swiftly and almost ran after him, clutching his sleeve as she came up to him, and breathing so hard with weakness and excitement that for the moment she could not speak.
The ’squire looked up, and angrily shook his arm out of her grasp. “Leave me alone, you hussy,” he snarled, “or I’ll lock you up!”
His misconstruction of her purpose cleared her mind. “Don’t be foolish,” she said, hurriedly. “It’s a question of perhaps life and death! Do you know where Reuben Tracy is? Or can you tell me where I can find out?”
“He don’t want to be bothered with you, wherever he is,” was the surly response. “Be off with you!”
“I told you it was a matter of life and death,” she insisted, earnestly. “He’ll never forgive you—you’ll never forgive yourself—if you know and won’t tell me.”
The sincerity of the girl’s tone impressed the old man. It was not easy for him to stand erect and unaided without swaying, but his mind was evidently clear enough.
“What do you want with him?” he asked, in a less unfriendly voice. Then he added, in a reflective undertone: “Cur’ous’t I sh’d want see Tracy, too.”
“Then you do know where he is?”
“He’s drove out to ’s mother’s farm. Seems word come old woman’s sick. You’re one of that Lawton tribe, aren’t you?”
“If I get a cutter, will you drive out there with me?” She asked the question with swift directness. She added in explanation, as he stared vacantly at her: “I ask that because you said you wanted to see him, that’s all. I shall go alone if you won’t come. He’s got to be back here this evening, or God only knows what’ll happen! I mean what I say!”
“Do you know the road?” the ’squire asked, catching something of her own eager spirit.
“Every inch of it! I was bom half a mile from where his mother lives.”
“But you won’t tell me what your business is?”
“I’ll tell you this much,” she whispered, hastily. “There is going to be a mob at the Minster house to-night. A girl who knows one of the men told—”
The old ’squire cut short the revelation by grasping her arm with fierce energy.
“Come on—come on!” he said, hoarsely. “Don’t waste a minute. By God! We’ll gallop the horses both ways.” He muttered to himself with excitement as he dragged her along.
Jessica waited outside the livery stable for what seemed an interminable period, while old “Cal” was getting the horses—walking up and down the path in a state of mental torment which precluded all sense of bodily suffering. When she conjured up before her frightened mind the terrible consequences which delay might entail, every minute became an intolerable hour of torture. There was even the evil chance that the old man had been refused the horses because he had been drinking.
Finally, however, there came the welcome sound of mailed hoofs on the plank roadway inside, and the reverberating jingle of bells; and then the ’squire, with a spacious double-seated sleigh containing plenty of robes, drew up in front of a cutting in the snow.
She took the front seat without hesitation, and gathered the lines into her own hands. “Let me drive,” she said, clucking the horses into a rapid trot. “I should be home in bed. I’m too ill to sit up, unless I’m doing something that keeps me from giving up.”
Reuben Tracy felt the evening in the sitting-room of the old farmhouse to be the most trying ordeal of his adult life.
Ordinarily he rather enjoyed than otherwise the company of his brother Ezra—a large, powerfully built, heavily bearded man, who sat now beside him in a rocking-chair in front of the wood stove, his stockinged feet on the hearth, and a last week’s agricultural paper on his knee. Ezra was a worthy and hard-working citizen, with an original way of looking at things, and considerable powers of expression. As a rule, the lawyer liked to talk with him, and felt that he profited in ideas and suggestions from the talk.
But to-night he found his brother insufferably dull, and the task of keeping down the “fidgets” one of incredible difficulty. His mother—on whose account he had been summoned—was so much better that Ezra’s wife had felt warranted in herself going off to bed, to get some much-needed rest. Ezra had argued for a while, rather perversely, about the tariff duty on wool, and now was nodding in his chair, although the dim-faced old wooden clock showed it to be barely eight o’clock. The kerosene lamp on the table gave forth only a feeble, reddened light through its smoky chimney, but diffused a most powerful odor upon the stuffy air of the over-heated room. A ragged and strong-smelling old farm dog groaned offensively from time to time in his sleep behind the stove. Even the draught which roared through the lower apertures in front of the stove and up the pipe toward the chimney was irritating by the very futility of its vehemence, for the place was too hot already.
Reuben mused in silence upon the chances which had led him so far away from this drowsy, unfruitful life, and smiled as he found himself wondering if it would be in the least possible for him to return to it. No—no one ever did return. The bright boys, the restless boys, the boys of energy, of ambition, of yearning for culture or conquest or the mere sensation of living where it was really life—all went away, leaving none but the Ezras behind. Some succeeded; some failed; but none of them ever came back. And the Ezras who remained on the farms—they seemed to shut and bolt the doors of their minds against all idea of making their own lot less sterile and barren and uninviting.
The mere mental necessity for a great contrast brought up suddenly in Reuben’s thoughts a picture of the drawing-room in the home of the Minsters. It seeme............