The day happened to be Sunday, and therefore the workmen were absent.
Carley had the place to herself. How the half-completed house mocked
her! She could not bear to look at it. What use could she make of it
now? Flo Hutter had become the working comrade of Glenn Kilbourne, the
mistress of his cabin. She was his wife and she would be the mother of
his children.
That thought gave birth to the darkest hour of Carley Burch's life. She
became possessed as by a thousand devils. She became merely a female
robbed of her mate. Reason was not in her, nor charity, nor justice.
All that was abnormal in human nature seemed coalesced in her, dominant,
passionate, savage, terrible. She hated with an incredible and insane
ferocity. In the seclusion of her tent, crouched on her bed, silent,
locked, motionless, she yet was the embodiment of all terrible strife
and storm in nature. Her heart was a maelstrom and would have whirled
and sucked down to hell all the beings that were men. Her soul was
a bottomless gulf, filled with the gales and the fires of jealousy,
superhuman to destroy.
That fury consumed all her remaining strength, and from the relapse she
sank to sleep.
Morning brought the inevitable reaction. However long her other
struggles, this monumental and final one would be brief. She realized
that, yet was unable to understand how it could be possible, unless
shock or death or mental aberration ended the fight. An eternity of
emotion lay back between this awakening of intelligence and the hour of
her fall into the clutches of primitive passion.
That morning she faced herself in the mirror and asked, "Now--what do I
owe you?" It was not her voice that answered. It was beyond her. But
it said: "Go on! You are cut adrift. You are alone. You owe none but
yourself!... Go on! Not backward--not to the depths--but up--upward!"
She shuddered at such a decree. How impossible for her! All animal, all
woman, all emotion, how could she live on the cold, pure heights? Yet
she owed something intangible and inscrutable to herself. Was it the
thing that woman lacked physically, yet contained hidden in her soul?
An element of eternal spirit to rise! Because of heartbreak and ruin
and irreparable loss must she fall? Was loss of love and husband and
children only a test? The present hour would be swallowed in the sum of
life's trials. She could not go back. She would not go down. There was
wrenched from her tried and sore heart an unalterable and unquenchable
decision--to make her own soul prove the evolution of woman. Vessel of
blood and flesh she might be, doomed by nature to the reproduction of
her kind, but she had in her the supreme spirit and power to carry on
the progress of the ages--the climb of woman out of the darkness.