"Ah, not all day! Not all day!" Marise kept the thought to herself. She had a vision of the man goaded beyond endurance, leaving his horses plodding in the row, while he fled blindly, to escape the unescapable.

An old resentment, centuries and ages older than she was, a primaeval heritage from the past, flamed up unexpectedly in her heart. _There_ was a man, she thought, who had kept the capacity really to love his wife; pa.s.sionately to suffer; whose cold intelligence had not chilled down to ..."

"Well, I guess I must be going now," said Nelly in the speech of the valley. She went away through the side-door, opening and shutting it with meticulous care, so that it would not make a sound... . As though a sound could reach Cousin Hetty now!

"I don't like her biscuits," said Agnes. "She always puts too much sody in." She added, in what was evidently the expression of an old dislike, "And don't she look a fool, a great hulking critter like her, wearing such shoes, teeterin' along on them heels."

"Oh well," said Marise, vaguely, "it's her idea of how to look pretty."

"They must cost an awful sight too," Agnes went on, scoldingly, "laced halfway up her leg that way. And the Powerses as poor as Job's turkey.

The money she puts into them shoes'd do 'em enough sight more good if 'twas saved up and put into a manure spreader, I call it."

She had taken the biscuits out of the oven and was holding them suspiciously to her nose, when someone came in at the front door and walked down the hall with the hushed, self-conscious, lugubrious tip-toe step of the day. It was Mr. Bayweather, his round old face rather pale.

"I'm shocked, unutterably shocked by this news," he said, and indeed he looked badly shaken and scared. It came to Marise that Cousin Hetty had been of about his age. He shook her hand and looked about for a chair.

"I came to see about which hymns you would like sung," he said. "Do you know if Miss Hetty had any favorites?" He broke off to say, "Mrs.

Bayweather wished me to be sure to excuse her to you for not coming with me tonight to see if there was anything she could do. But she was stopped by old Mrs. Warner, just as we were leaving the house. Frank, it seems, went off early this morning to survey some lines in the woods somewhere on the mountain, and was to be back to lunch. He didn't come then and hasn't showed up at all yet. Mrs. Warner wanted my wife to telephone up to North Ashley to see if he had perhaps gone there to spend the night with his aunt. The line was busy of course, and Mrs.

Bayweather was still trying to get them on the wire when I had to come away. If she had no special favorites, I think that 'Lead, Kindly Light, Amid th' Encircling Gloom' is always suitable, don't you?"

Something seemed to explode inside Marise's mind, and like a resultant black cloud of smoke a huge and ominous possibility loomed up, so darkly, so unexpectedly, that she had no breath to answer the clergyman's question. Those lines Frank Warner had gone to survey ran through the Eagle Rock woods!

"Or would you think an Easter one, like 'The Strife Is O'er, the Battle Won,' more appropriate?" suggested Mr. Bayweather to her silence.

Agnes started. "Who's that come bursting into the kitchen?" she cried, turning towards the door.

It seemed to Marise, afterwards, that she had known at that moment who had come and what the tidings were.

Agnes started towards the door to open it. But it was flung open abruptly from the outside. Toucle stood there, her hat gone from her head, her rusty black clothes torn and disarranged.

Marise knew what she was about to announce.

She cried out to them, "Frank Warner has fallen off the Eagle Rocks. I found him there, at the bottom, half an hour ago, dead."

The savage old flame, centuries and ages older than she, flared for an instant high and smoky in Marise's heart. "_There_ is a man who knows how to fight for his wife and keep her!" she thought fiercely.

CHAPTER XXI

THE COUNSEL OF THE STARS

July 21. Night.

It had been arranged that for the two nights before the funeral Agnes was to sleep in the front bedroom, on one side of Cousin Hetty's room, and Marise in the small hall bedroom on the other side, the same room and the same bed in which she had slept as a little girl. Nothing had been changed there, since those days. The same heavy white pitcher and basin stood in the old wash-stand with the sunken top and hinged cover; the same oval white soap-dish, the same ornamental spatter-work frame in dark walnut hung over the narrow walnut bedstead.

As she undressed in the s.p.a.ce between the bed and the wash-stand, the past came up before her in a sudden splashing wave of recollection which for a moment engulfed her. It had all been a dream, all that had happened since then, and she was again eight years old, with nothing in the world but bad dreams to fear, and Cousin Hetty there at hand as a refuge even against bad dreams. How many times she had wakened, terrified, her heart beating hammer-strokes against her ribs, and trotted shivering, in her night-gown, into Cousin Hetty's room.

"Cousin Hetty! Cousin Hetty!"

"What? What's that? Oh, you, Marise. What's the matter? Notions again?"

"Oh, Cousin Hetty, it was an _awful_ dream this time. Can't I get into bed with you?"

"Why yes, come along, you silly child."

The fumbling approach to the bed, the sheets held open, the kind old hand outstretched, and then the haven ... her head on the same pillow with that of the brave old woman who was afraid of nothing, who drew her up close and safe and with comforting a.s.surance instantly fell asleep again. And then the delicious, slow fading of the terrors before the obliterating hand of sleep, the delicious slow sinking into forgetfulness of everything.

Standing there, clad in the splendor of her physical maturity, Marise shivered uncontrollably again, and quaked and feared. It was all a bad dream, all of it, and now as then Cousin Hetty lay safe and quiet, wrapped in sleep which was the only escape. Marise turned sick with longing to go again, now, to seek out Cousin Hetty and to lie down by her to share that safe and cold and dreamless quiet.

She flung back over her shoulder the long shining dark braid which her fingers had been automatically twisting, and stood for a moment motionless. She was suffering acutely, but the pain came from a source so deep, so confused, so inarticulate, that she could not name it, could not bring to bear on it any of the resources of her intelligence and will. She could only bend under it as under a crushing burden, and suffer as an animal endures pain, dumbly, stupidly.

After a time a small knock sounded, and Agnes's voice asked through the door if Miss Marise thought the door to ... to ... if the "other" door ought to be open or shut. It was shut now. What did people do as a general thing?

Marise opened her own door and looked down on the old figure in the straight, yellowed night-gown, the knotted, big-veined hand shielding the candle from the wandering summer breeze which blew an occasional silent, fragrant breath in from the open windows.

"I don't know what people do as a rule," she answered, and then asked, "How did Miss Hetty like best to have it, herself?"

"Oh, open, always."

"We'd better open it, then."

The old servant swayed before the closed door, the candlestick shaking in her hand. She looked up at Marise timidly. "You do it," she said under her breath.

Marise felt a faint pitying scorn, stepped past Agnes, lifted the latch, and opened the door wide into the blackness of the other room.

The dense silence seemed to come out, coldly and softly. For Marise it had the sweetness of a longed-for anaesthetic, it had the very odor of the dreamless quiet into which she longed to sink. But Agnes shrank away, drew hastily closer to Marise, and whispered in a sudden panic, "Oh, don't it scare you? Aren't you afraid to be here all alone, just you and me? We'd ought to have had a man stay too."

Marise tried to answer simply and kindly, "No, I'm not afraid. It is only all that is left of dear Cousin Hetty." But the impatience and contemptuous surprise which she kept out of her words and voice were felt none the less by the old woman. She drooped submissively as under a reproach. "I know it's foolish," she murmured, "I know it's foolish."

She began again to weep, the tears filling her faded eyes and running quietly down her wrinkled old cheeks. "You don't know how gone I feel without her!" she mourned. "I'd always had her to tell me what to do.

Thirty-five years now, every day, she's been here to tell me what to do.

I can't make it seem true, that it's her lying in there. Seems as though every minute she'd come in, stepping quick, the way she did. And I fairly open my mouth to ask her, 'Now Miss Hetty, what shall I do next?'

and then it all comes over me."

Marise's impatience and scorn were flooded by an immense sympathy. What a pitiable thing a dependent is! Poor old Agnes! She leaned down to the humble, docile old face, and put her cheek against it. "I'll do my best to take Cousin Hetty's place for you," she said gently, and then, "Now you'd better go back to bed. There's a hard day ahead of us."

Agnes responded with relief to the tone of authority. She said with a rea.s.sured accent, "Well, it's all right if _you're_ not afraid," turned and shuffled down the hall, comforted and obedient.

Marise saw her go into her room, heard the creak of the bed as she lay down on it, and then the old voice, "Miss Marise, will it be all right if I leave my candle burning, just this once?"