An immense anguish of the present wrung her heart, and she nearly cried
aloud. That dread of what was before her which had been eating up her
courage slowly in the course of odious years, flamed up into an access of
panic, that sort of headlong panic which had already driven her out twice
to the top of the cliff-like quarry. She jumped up saying to herself:
"Why not now? At once! Yes. I'll do it now--in the dark!" The very
horror of it seemed to give her additional resolution.
She came down the staircase quietly, and only on the point of opening the
door and because of the discovery that it was unfastened, she remembered
Captain Anthony's threat to stay in the garden all night. She hesitated.
She did not understand the mood of that man clearly. He was violent. But
she had gone beyond the point where things matter. What would he think
of her coming down to him--as he would naturally suppose. And even that
didn't matter. He could not despise her more than she despised herself.
She must have been light-headed because the thought came into her mind
that should he get into ungovernable fury from disappointment, and
perchance strangle her, it would be as good a way to be done with it as
any.
"You had that thought," I exclaimed in wonder.
With downcast eyes and speaking with an almost painstaking precision (her
very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard and no
more), she said that, yes, the thought came into her head. This makes
one shudder at the mysterious ways girls acquire knowledge. For this was
a thought, wild enough, I admit, but which could only have come from the
depths of that sort of experience which she had not had, and went far
beyond a young girl's possible conception of the strongest and most
veiled of human emotions.
"He was there, of course?" I said.
"Yes, he was there." She saw him on the path directly she stepped
outside the porch. He was very still. It was as though he had been
standing there with his face to the door for hours.
Shaken up by the changing moods of passion and tenderness, he must have
been ready for any extravagance of conduct. Knowing the profound silence
each night brought to that nook of the country, I could imagine them
having the feeling of being the only two people on the wide earth. A row
of six or seven lofty elms just across the road opposite the cottage made
the night more obscure in that little garden. If these two could just
make out each other that was all.