CHAPTER XVII. A BROKEN FETTER
Eric went home with a white, haggard face. He had never thought
it was possible for a man to suffer as he suffered then. What was
he to do? It seemed impossible to go on with life--there was NO
life apart from Kilmeny. Anguish wrung his soul until his
strength went from him and youth and hope turned to gall and
bitterness in his heart.
He never afterwards could tell how he lived through the following
Sunday or how he taught school as usual on Monday. He found out
how much a man may suffer and yet go on living and working. His
body seemed to him an automaton that moved and spoke
mechanically, while his tortured spirit, pent-up within, endured
pain that left its impress on him for ever. Out of that fiery
furnace of agony Eric Marshall was to go forth a man who had put
boyhood behind him for ever and looked out on life with eyes that
saw into it and beyond.
On Tuesday afternoon there was a funeral in the district and,
according to custom, the school was closed. Eric went again to
the old orchard. He had no expectation of seeing Kilmeny there,
for he thought she would avoid the spot lest she might meet him.
But he could not keep away from it, although the thought of it
was an added torment, and he vibrated between a wild wish that he
might never see it again, and a sick wonder how he could possibly
go away and leave it--that strange old orchard where he had met
and wooed his sweetheart, watching her develop and blossom under
his eyes, like some rare flower, until in the space of three
short months she had passed from exquisite childhood into still
more exquisite womanhood.
As he crossed the pasture field before the spruce wood he came
upon Neil Gordon, building a longer fence. Neil did not look up
as Eric passed, but sullenly went on driving poles. Before this
Eric had pitied Neil; now he was conscious of feeling sympathy
with him. Had Neil suffered as he was suffering? Eric had
entered into a new fellowship whereof the passport was pain.
The orchard was very silent and dreamy in the thick, deep tinted
sunshine of the September afternoon, a sunshine which seemed to
possess the power of extracting the very essence of all the
odours which summer has stored up in wood and field. There were
few flowers now; most of the lilies, which had queened it so
bravely along the central path a few days before, were withered.
The grass had become ragged and sere and unkempt. But in the
corners the torches of the goldenrod were kindling and a few
misty purple asters nodded here and there. The orchard kept its
own strange attractiveness, as some women with youth long passed
still preserve an atmosphere of remembered beauty and innate,
indestructible charm.
Eric walked drearily and carelessly about it, and finally sat
down on a half fallen fence panel in the shadow of the
overhanging spruce boughs. There he gave himself up to a
reverie, poignant and bitter sweet, in which he lived over again
everything that had passed in the orchard since his first meeting
there with Kilmeny.
So deep was his abstraction that he was conscious of nothing
around him. He did not hear stealthy footsteps behind him in the
dim spruce wood. He did not even see Kilmeny as she came slowly
around the curve of the wild cherry lane.
Kilmeny had sought the old orchard for the healing of her
heartbreak, if healing were possible for her. She had no fear of
encountering Eric there at that time of day, for she did not know
that it was the district custom to close the school for a
funeral. She would never have gone to it in the evening, but she
longed for it continually; it, and her memories, were all that
was left her now.
Years seemed to have passed over the girl in those few days. She
had drunk of pain and broken bread with sorrow. Her face was
pale and strained, with bluish, transparent shadows under her
large wistful eyes, out of which the dream and laughter of
girlhood had gone, but into which had come the potent charm of
grief and patience. Thomas Gordon had shaken his head bodingly
when he had looked at her that morning at the breakfast table.
"She won't stand it," he thought. "She isn't long for this
world. Maybe it is all for the best, poor lass. But I wish that
young Master had never set foot in the Connors orchard, or in
this house. Margaret, Margaret, it's hard that your child should
have to be paying the reckoning of a sin that was sinned before
her birth."
Kilmeny walked through the lane slowly and absently like a woman
in a dream. When she came to the gap in the fence where the lane
ran into the orchard she lifted her wan, drooping face and saw
Eric, sitting in the shadow of the wood at the other side of the
orchard with his bowed head in his hands. She stopped quickly
and the blood rushed wildly over her face.
The next moment it ebbed, leaving her white as marble. Horror
filled her eyes,--blank, deadly horror, as the livid shadow of a
cloud might fill two blue pools.
Behind Eric Neil Gordon was standing tense, crouched, murderous.
Even at that distance Kilmeny saw the look on his face, saw what
he held in his hand, and realized in one agonized flash of
comprehension what it meant.
All this photographed itself in her brain in an instant. She
knew that by the time she could run across the orchard to warn
Eric by a touch it would be too late. Yet she must warn him--she
MUST--she MUST! A mighty surge of desire seemed to rise up
within her and overwhelm her like a wave of the sea,--a surge
that swept everything before it in an irresistible flood. As
Neil Gordon swiftly and vindictively, with the face of a demon,
lifted the axe he held in his hand, Kilmeny sprang forward
through the gap.
"ERIC, ERIC, LOOK BEHIND YOU--LOOK BEHIND YOU!"
Eric started up, confused, bewildered, as the voice came
shrieking across the orchard. He did not in the least realize
that it was Kilmeny who had called to him, but he instinctively
obeyed the command.
He wheeled around and saw Neil Gordon, who was looking, not at
him, but past him at Kilmeny. The Italian boy's face was ashen
and his eyes were filled with terror and incredulity, as if he
had been checked in his murderous purpose by some supernatural
interposition. The axe, lying at his feet where he had dropped
it in his unutterable consternation on hearing Kilmeny's cry told
the whole tale. But before Eric could utter a word Neil turned,
with a cry more like that of an animal than a human being, and
fled like a hunted creature into the shadow of the spruce wood.
A moment later Kilmeny, her lovely face dewed with tears and
sunned over with smiles, flung herself on Eric's breast.
"Oh, Eric, I can speak,--I can speak! Oh, it is so wonderful!
Eric, I love you--I love you!"
