Across the country Daunt strode, paying little heed to his direction. He skirted one field, crossed another, swung through a gully, scrambled along a gravel-pit, climbed a hilly slope, and cut across in a wide circuit. He thought that physical weariness might bring mental relief. He paused for a moment by the edge of a clayey bank, in which a multitude of tiny sand-swallows—winged cliff-dwellers—had pecked them vaulted homes. He thrust his stick gently into one of the openings and smiled to see the bridling anger of its feathered inhabitant.
Seating himself upon a pile of split rails in a fence corner, he dropped into reverie. He was conscious of an immense depression. The past few weeks had brought him nearer to realizing how much Margaret meant, not only to himself, but to his labor in the world, than he had ever been before. His artistic temperament had pointed him a dreamer, but his natural earnestness had made him a laborious one. His ideals were fresh and strong, and the world of tangled interests and woven ambitions had stood before him always, mute, importunate, a place to make them real. In man’s ear there sound ever three voices: the brazen-throated throng, the silver-throated few and the golden-throated one. This last voice Daunt had learned to listen to. He had made Margaret his unconscious motive. The best of his written work had been done at the huge antique mahogany desk under her picture. What she had been to his work, what she was then, showed him what her presence or absence in his life must inevitably mean. He realized the truth of what he had once scoffed at, that behind every man’s success lies the heart of a woman.
He felt a profound disheartenment. His mind skimmed the waste of his younger years. It saw his toils as little things and the work he had praised in himself as that of a trifler. He knew now his capacities for ambition. He saw inspiration for the first time as, on a twilit highway, one sees a fancied bush, with a sudden movement, resolve itself into a human figure. He saw his past, harvestless. Fate had taken his youth, like a handful of sand, and fed it to the sea! Since Margaret had gone, his work had been purposeless, barren—it wanted her presence.
He had lighted his pipe mechanically, and through the blue-pale smoke whorls, a near bush took on the outline of her clear profile, reclined against a dusky cushion. His longing filled the silence with an inward voice:
“You are the woman,” it said, “that I have always wanted! I want you all! I want your childish shallows and your womanly deeps! I want your weakness and your strength! I want you just as you are, no different—you, yourself.”
She was sitting before him now in the firelight of her room, where the tongues of the burning drift-wood and salt-dusted larch sprang up, blue, magenta and purplish-green, prickling the brass-work of the fireplace into a thousand many-colored points, and he was leaning forward, speaking, with his bare heart behind set lips: “I love you. All that I have for you that you will not own! All that you might be to me that you will not give!”
He felt her present trouble vaguely and with the same impotent resentment that he had felt in that far-off yet ridiculously near child-life, when in all the lofty manhood of his eight years he had defied the cliff-winds—that childhood which lived in his memory as a stretch of sun-drowned sea-beach swept by wind; a dim background in a frame of sharp outline, which held little images of delicate fragrance, clear and sweet, on the retina of his memory. This woman met him in a pain, measured by his added years, that he was powerless to appease.
Knocking the cold ashes from his pipe, Daunt rose and stretched his arms wide along the topmost rail of the shambling fence and gazed out across the evening hills, blurred by the blue of distance, into the red sunset. Far to the left, glooming from encircling elms, lay the house that sheltered Margaret. Down below him, in the railroad cut, crawled a deliberate tank-train. From where he stood, he could see the ungainly arm of the slung pipe, through which the thirsty engine drank deep draughts. Sitting in the chill air had told him his fatigue, and his wrist had grown stiff and painful. He felt unequal to the long walk across to Tenbridge, and, consulting his watch, reflected that the city-bound train, almost due, would carry him to the little Guthrie junction, shortening his walk by half.
He pushed rapidly down the hill road, grateful for the heat of renewed motion. The station was deserted. One shabby hack drowsed driverless under the shed, and even the ticket agent had apparently forsaken his grating.
Sauntering across the platform, Daunt leaned against the signal-post, on whose swinging arm a round, fevered eye watched, unwinkingly and angry, for the distant train, fast growing from a bright pin point to a blazing blotch of yellow, between the spun-out rails. Its attenuated rumbling had swelled to a trembling roar. His pre-occupation was so deep that the clamorous iron thing was upon him almost before he heard it. The surprise jarred him into sudden movement, and it was then that his tired limbs lurched under him; the sucking vortex of the hurtling mass threw him off his balance, he wavered, stumbled, fell—and the pitiless armored monster, plunging, gigantic, regardless, caught him on its mailed side and passed on, to shudder, to slow, to stop—too late!
