When at length she succeeded in telling him faintly that if he refused this opportunity he must fall lower and lower and lose even the desire for good, she found that her words had no longer any power to influence.

He had pa.s.sed beyond into some region of outer darkness, where the things of sense did not seem to penetrate, and where, if the actions of his body were the expression of his soul, there was literally "wailing and gnashing of teeth."

But Susannah hovered over him, not so much angry as pitiful, her own agony of mere physical sympathy increasing. Terrified to be near him, too compa.s.sionate to withdraw, she watched till at last the veins in his hands and his face became swollen and knotted. She was unwilling to lose the hope of her sole influence over him, and yet was about to call for help, when almost suddenly he seemed to become conscious of his surroundings again and shake himself free from the distress.

In a little while he was sitting on one of the chairs, wiping his purple face and swollen eyes with the large silken pocket-handkerchief that was one of the signs of his recent opulence. She saw the large ring on his swollen finger gradually loosen, and the hand return to its normal shape and colour. She felt convinced that his pulses had gone back to their common flow, because his whole volition had returned peacefully to its low ambitions and self-indulgence. She knew instinctively that it was not thus opulent and fierce that he would have looked had he come out on the other side of his temptation. She stood, outwardly patient, waiting helpless till he should speak.

"Sit down, sister," he panted condescendingly. He was fanning himself with the handkerchief now, as a man might who felt injured by undue heat in the atmosphere.

Her refusal was concise and severe.

He looked at her boldly, with no apprehension now in his eyes, not even the former conciliatory desire to receive her with fair words. She felt appalled. Could it be that his angel in deserting him had deserted her?

Was there a devil strong enough to give her to him? It was perhaps only his belief which overshadowed hers, it was perhaps only, as she thought, a sickness of nerve but the impression that unseen personalities had been contending here was stronger upon her even than her anger and fear.

Smith got up and went to the window. His horses and buggy were still parading.

"I guess I've changed my mind," he said. He did not care, it seemed, to delude her, but he must still deceive himself. "I couldn't go against the voice of the church council to that extent; it wouldn't be safe for you or me; and besides, 'tisn't the Lord's will that you should go."

She recoiled, looking at him in steady reproach.

"Well, as I said before, I guess you can think it over for a few days."

This was his easy answer to her look, and he went out, slamming the door.

CHAPTER V.

When that day began to wane Susannah was still sitting in the empty curtained room. No plan which offered even a fair hope of escape had occurred to her mind. Although in pictures of adventure her imagination had been fertile, throwing out suggestions unbidden, her judgment would have none of them. No one disturbed her. She was left in isolation, a prey to dismal thoughts.

She saw the happy crowds dispersing in the Square from evening recreation. There was nothing to hinder her from joining them. Sometimes her sense of imprisonment seemed only a morbid dream, for on all sides of the fair white city there was open ingress and egress for the faithful and the stranger. It was hard to believe that at wharfs and on the high roads fanatics watched for her, and yet after Smith's reluctant avowal she dare not doubt it.

She saw evening fade over the broad semi-circle of the river, over the mult.i.tude of cheerful homes that sloped to its edge. When darkness came she found herself more than ever pressed and tormented by the grim shapes of fear and remorse and despair. She had terrible reason to fear, and felt as never before that she had brought this horrid situation upon herself by joining and rejoining the prophet's following.

She had no hope now that Smith would relent.

Beyond the city, eastward toward the sun-rising, lay the home of Ephraim's friendship, whither in the morning she had thought to bend her steps. She saw it through the glad glamour of her recent knowledge that he had not neglected her letters. All her desires fled to this thought of his friendship, like birds flying home. All her fancies cl.u.s.tered round it, like climbing flowers that caress and kiss the object they enfold when some rude wind disturbs. Whenever she withdrew her mind from its contemplation, the circ.u.mstances on which she looked were the more revolting.

Ever since Smith left she had been more or less under the impression that an unseen person there in that very room had contended with him.

Again and again she had swept it aside as an infectious madness that she was catching from the fanatics about her, but it had recurred; and now as, not caring to light her lamps, she sat alone in the darkness by the very table against which Smith had writhed and wailed, she felt pressed upon by a spiritual life external to her own.

Within her soul from some unknown depth the word arose distinctly as if spoken, "Pray. You cannot save yourself. Pray."

"I am going mad." Susannah whispered the words audibly. It was a comfort to her even to hear her own voice. But when her whisper was past she again listened involuntarily.

The words within her rose again. "Even so. Pray. If you are going mad, you have the more need."

Susannah had come to cla.s.s all search for definite and material answer to prayer as one of the superst.i.tions of false religion. In this category stood also the hearing of voices and obedience to monitions from the unseen. Now she reproached herself because she could not immediately silence this fancy of disturbed nerves.

Long sad thoughts of all her reasons against prayer, strongest among them the futility of her husband's prayers, pa.s.sed through her mind with their train of haunting memories, but in the cessation from argument which these pictures of the past produced, the words arose again dearly within her soul, like airdrops rising from the depths of a well and expanding into momentary iridescence on the surface, "Pray for help. If you have no faith in G.o.d's arm, you have the more need to seek it."

Stung by the fear that she was losing her mind, she rose as she would have faced a human antagonist.

"G.o.d's arm!" she said aloud, "my husband prayed such prayers, but I will ask nothing till I see his request fulfilled."

She spoke the quick words with an almost reckless sense of experiment.

Her thought was that before she could honestly think of such prayer she must see some fruit of Angel's pet.i.tions for this man Smith and for her own safety.

"Save Smith from further degradation," she said, her breath coming sharply. "Save me now, if that sort of prayer is right. Do this in answer to my husband's prayers. Remember his prayers."

She had begun recklessly, supposing that she was contending only with her own sick fancy; she was astonished that a few swift moments had involved her in an increasing sense of personal contact, and she became awed by the strength of the encounter.

"My husband prayed for my safety," she repeated with softened att.i.tude; then, as if seeking for the protection which had died with him, she repeated again and again, "Remember his prayers."

She left the challenge at last apparently to die where she had breathed it in the dark cold air of her lonely room. The tension of her mind relaxed.

She sat down again, not knowing whether anything had occurred, but a crisis in the morbid working of her strained nerves had in some way relieved her.

She was curiously unable to go back to her former agonised anxieties.

Natural fatigue, even sleepiness, came over her, but not her fears, even though she wooed them.

"Ah, well," she said within herself, "it is quite true that it is useless to consider when I can give myself no help."

The habits of the Saints were early. When she heard silence fall upon the great house she went into her sleeping-room and lay down upon the bed. Sleep came quickly.

With the early dawn she opened her eyes. In the first moments of half-awaked consciousness she was aware that one thought lay alone in the empty horizon of her mind, like a trace left by a dream that had pa.s.sed, as a wisp of cloud may be left in an empty sky.

This thought was that she would at once go down to the river bank upon the southwest of the town.

When other thoughts awoke and crowded within her ken this thought appeared foolish, and still more so the strong influence it had left upon her will, for in the momentum of this influence she had risen without debating the point.

She was not aware that she had moved in her sleep or dreamed. She was greatly refreshed and again unreasonably light-hearted. She opened her shutters and saw that the dawn was calm and fair. As yet the sleeping town had scarcely stirred.

"It is better to go out than to stay in," she said to herself as she remembered that this hour would be her one chance of taking air and exercise un.o.bserved. She heard the main door of the house open and, looking over the banister, saw a slattern with bucket and mop pa.s.sing into some back pa.s.sage. She went lightly down and out into the fresh frosty air.

What had that dream been concerning the river bank on the south-western side? She could not recall it, nor had she ever explored the streets of white wooden villas and cottages that lay upon that side. She went thither now. There was no reason why she should not go, no reason to go elsewhere. It was a pleasant walk. When she had pa.s.sed the last house, the bank sloped in open uncared-for gra.s.s where cows were grazing. Only here and there she had seen a house-door open, and as yet in this place no one was abroad except a boy who was playing idly in a boat, which was drawn half up on the muddy bank.

The broad river, milk-white under a dappled sky, stretched south and west. The other side was dim and blue in the faint vapour of the relaxing frost. The air was sweet and still. The sunbeams, imprisoned in eastern vapour, shone through the white veil with soft glow that cast no shadow but comforted the earth with hope.

Susannah had a further thought in her mind now, but she felt no haste or impatience of excitement.

The boy was of an active, restless disposition or he would hardly have been out so early. Lithe and idle, he sat see-sawing in the floating end of the boat, uncertain how to amuse himself. He returned Susannah's greeting with a lively flow of talk.

"You don't know how to row," said Susannah.

She showed no eagerness, for she felt none. The hope she had just formed was most uncertain, for it appeared not at all likely that she could escape in this way without being molested.

"I bet I can row," said the boy, "as well as any man in town."

"That isn't saying much," said Susannah. "The men about here have very few boats, and they are most of them afraid to go on anything smaller than the steamer."