Chapter XLI: Cast Upon the Waters

Clara fell down on her knees by that funereal bed. Softly and reverently she turned that white face toward her, and gathered up the silvery hair.

“She loved me: people thought her cross; but she was only old and so good at heart. It was to-day that she kissed me. Dear old grandmother, she wasn’t given to many caresses, and it was because I had such bitter troubles falling on me like blows that she became so child-like. I think she died for me. Some one gave her a great wound on the heart, and it killed her. She was very old, you know, and poured all her strength out in an hour, then lay down for rest and died. I wish it had been me. Oh, I wish it had been me!”

These words came out in faint snatches, uttered with indescribable mournfulness; now with her tearless eyes fixed on that cold face, then lifted to the minister with a look of such pathetic misery that his kind heart ached for her.

Betsey Vose sat back in the shadows, weeping, humbly and silently. This was all the help she could give now. Ben hung about the door, sobbing like a child. The minister looked around on these humble people, and remembered with compassionate thankfulness what fast friends they had been to the woman who was gone, and that fair young creature who remained.

Only those two of all their neighbors—only those two!

The clergyman fell upon his knees, smitten to the soul by this reflection, and poured forth his agony of Christian shame in prayer—not for the dead; he knew that she was with God—not for that poor young woman, for he felt that she was nearer to the great white throne than most of those who broke bread, and bathed their lips in holy wine at his altar. No; he prayed with all the force of his nature, that God would forgive those, who, from malice or carelessness, had hunted that old woman to her grave, and pursued that fair, blameless girl, till she could find no shelter save on her knees by that death-bed.

Scarcely had the good man risen from his knees, when a sound of feet and a faint tumult of voices came up from the rooms below. One voice, above all others, smote Clara’s ear, and brought back the conversation that had seemed to fall dead upon her when she stood in that dusky ante-room in the parsonage. One by one, as if written upon her brain in letters of fire, the words of Deacon Jones came out in her memory. Now his voice smote her like a blow—his voice dominating over others still more hateful.

Deacon Jones, while seeking for the doctor, had spread the news of Mrs. Anderson’s illness over the neighborhood, and with those two came half a dozen women, some of them ringleaders and slander-whisperers in the sewing circle, that twenty-four hours before had dwelt upon hunger as a sure way of driving the old woman and her granddaughter out of their home.

Clara Anderson heard these voices, and fled from that death-chamber without a word. On the stairs she met the doctor and Deacon Jones. In the shadows underneath she saw a group of women, with eager upturned faces, ready to follow.

These women drew back appalled by the dead whiteness of her face as she passed through them. One more audacious or stolid than the rest caught at her dress, and asked some question.

Clara neither heard her words nor felt her touch, but passed through the back door, and out into the night.

Those voices, that dark grouping of her enemies who came to mock her with their cruel compassion, had aroused the latent fever in her veins almost to frenzy.

The gentler feelings fostered by her last interview with the old grandmother, whose death-chamber they were about to desecrate, were swept away. Blind with anguish, wild with a feeling that she had been hunted from that death-bed, she rushed on through the gray fog, without aim or resolve, beset only by a wild longing to flee from a home which was full of her enemies.

On she went, through the home pasture, down by the hemlock banks and the clump of elm trees, drawn toward the river by a weird fascination. It seemed to her as if a voice of the waters were calling upon her to join them as they fled away from a place that had been so full of misery.

With a strange idea, that by stillness she might baffle pursuit, she parted the golden willow branches and crept under them, close down to the water, which seemed to call her away in whispers muffled by the floating fog. As her eyes became accustomed to the gray light, she saw Ben’s canoe rocking sleepily by the bank, overshadowed by willow branches, and moored to a sapling that grew close by her.

This little craft Ben had rescued from the stream miles below “the deep hole,” after his disaster, and there it lay, peaceful as a bird’s nest, giving back a soft responsive motion to the whispers of the waves.

Clara listened earnestly. Why should the waters escape from that solitude, singing as they went, and she sit there so bereft and desolate? Surely they must find some place of rest and quiet.

She stood up in the clinging gray of the fog and cautiously untied the cable to which the canoe swung, drew the little craft close under the bank, stepped into it, and lay down with her arms folded under her head, and her face uplifted to the muffled sky.

How long she rested thus mournfully supine no one can tell; but the mellow singing of the waves around her strange bed, the faint shiver of the leaves, and the fog that enveloped her with its damp gray, had all the fascinations of weird music for her. She lifted up her arms and seemed to gather the mist around her, whispering hoarsely:

“Now I am ready. Now I am ready.”

For a little time the canoe lay within the shade of the willows, rolling softly; then it drifted into the stream, took a current, and moved off with ghostly slowness between the black waters and the drifting fog.