CHAPTER V.
AN AWFUL GRIEF.
“Must I really go? Oh, surely, gran’ther did not mean to be so cruel! He is so fiery in his tempers, but presently he will be gentle as a lamb again! Let me wait till he grows calmer! Oh, Heaven, it is midnight, and freezing cold, and I have nowhere to go!” sobbed Eva, clinging to the spinster, who shook her off scornfully, exclaiming:
“Yes, your gran’ther meant every word he said, an’ told me to start you, an’ I’m going to do it! Decent females like Patty, an’ Lydia, and me ain’t going to stay under the same roof with the likes o’ you till morning.”
To do her justice, the woman believed implicitly in the truth of Terry’s story, thinking that Eva’s explanation was a falsehood trumped up on the spur of the moment to save herself.
Her virtuous soul boiled over with indignation against the “little baggage,” as she called her in her thoughts, and she felt that Eva well deserved the punishment that was meted out to her for her sin.
So she shook off the clinging grasp of the little white hands as if they had been contamination, and turned a stony gaze on the big, pleading dark eyes and tremulous red lips of the lovely outcast, adding harshly:
“Don’t say you’ve nowhere to go, for there’s money in that purse to take you to your dad in New York, where your gran’ther told you to go, an’ where you should ha’ been all this time by good rights, instid o’ here, taking the bread out o’ others’ mouths! Go, now, right to the station, an’ you’ll ketch the New York train in time if you walk fast. Good-by, an’ try to be a better girl hereafter. Well, I never!” recoiling from the purse that Eva aimed at her head in a paroxysm of indignant anger as she reached the door, flitting out like a shadow of the autumn night, penniless, despairing, outcast from home and love, with a blight upon her name.
“Let us keep the purse and divide it between us three. Gran’ther needn’t ever know Eva didn’t take it!” Patty cried greedily, heedless that it was her grandfather’s only wealth, the hoarded fifty dollars he had been saving for his funeral expenses that his grandchildren need not be embarrassed by his death.
There was no one to betray them, for the others had gone out to spread the awful news of the tragedy, some to old Doctor Ludington’s, to awake him to the awful truth; others to the town for the coroner and the undertaker.
Meanwhile, Eva, dazed with grief and despair, had flitted out like a shadow of the fateful Hallowe’en into the chilly night toward the stable for Firefly.
She had no intention of seeking her father in New York, as she had been bidden. Instead, her wistful thoughts turned in fancy toward a dear, kind, oldwoman, a friend of her dead grandmother, who lived about nine miles away on a high mountain. She would seek refuge with her, biding gran’ther’s repentance, which she felt sure must come before many days.
Alas! the mischievous spirits of Hallowe’en had worked havoc with her plans.
The stable doors stood wide open, and Firefly and the other two horses were gone, just as on last Hallowe’en, when they had been chased several miles from home by youths on mischief bent.
“I must walk, and, oh! it is so cold, and the air is so smoky from the forest fires that the moon gives no light. What if I get lost on the mountain, and the wolves eat me up?” shuddered hapless Eva, setting out, nevertheless, on her way toward the only refuge she knew, for, in the near neighborhood, the Groves family had no warm friends by reason of gran’ther’s unpopularity during the war, which had clung to him tenaciously ever since.
She trudged on wearily, with the weight of an awful grief at her heart, and great, burning tears blinding her sombre dark eyes, so that it was no wonder that she could not see through the dense, overhanging smoke from the mountains, where the woods had been on fire for days, until all the neighbors were praying for rain to quench the spreading flames.
Wearily, tremblingly, the little thing plodded along the road, shivering with cold, and starting at everysound of the eerie night, for she had always been called timid, considering she was a country girl, who oughtn’t to be afraid of anything.
Mile after mile she went through the night, little dreaming that she had long ago lost her way and was wandering deeper into the woods at every fearful step, till at last she walked into a little creek up to her knees in the icy water.
Trying to get out, she fell sprawling down upon the rock bed, and floundered there several moments before she extricated herself and scrambled out, drenched and freezing, on the bank.
“Oh, Heaven, where have I wandered? I am lost in the woods, for there is no creek in the road between here and Goody Brown’s!” she thought, in despair.
She knew not which way to turn; she could not see her hand before her in the darkness; but she felt that she would perish of cold and wet if she did not keep moving, and the bitter thought came to her that she could not keep going much longer for sheer fatigue, so that she must sink down presently and freeze to death in the biting cold.
She was so young to die, and she loved life in spite of the cruel disappointments it had brought her, still hoping for something brighter in that distant future to which youth’s eyes are ever turned; so she dragged herself up to her feet and ran with all her strength a little way, then fell down, panting and exhausted, her wet garments freezing to her limbs, the shoes tornfrom her tender feet by the rocky road, the salt tears freezing on her cold cheeks.
She rested a few moments, then began to crawl along over the ground, tearing her soft little hands on rocks and thorns till they bled, and sobbing as she went:
“Oh, God, have mercy! Don’t let poor little Eva die of the cold out in the lonesome woods without a friend to close her eyes!”
Oh, the night, how long and terrible it seemed. Though it was past midnight when they had driven her out from home, and she seemed to have been walking hours, and hours, and hours, no welcome rays of daylight glimmered through the dense wooded gloom of the long night. In the distance she heard the tu-whit of the mystic owl, and the almost human scream of the terrible panther, thirsting for prey, and trembled and shuddered with fear of becoming his victim. She moaned to herself that if she lived until to-morrow all her golden hair would be turned white by the agony of these interminable hours. She would be changed into an old woman in a night.
Oh, the terror of the awful darkness and solitude, without one ray of light or welcome sound! If she had possessed a fortune, little Eva would have given it gladly for one sound of a human voice, even though it spoke to her in chiding.
And through all the darkness there was one sight ever before her eyes—the two men lying stark and dead in those crimson pools upon the floor of herdainty little white-hung room, her maiden retreat from all the world. That sight would haunt her till she died, be her years few or many.
“I was not to blame. The sin lies at another’s door. Why did they drive me out like a leper, to perish on the highway?” she moaned, dragging herself on and on, until, finally, she sank down unconscious.
She lay like one dead on the carpet of dead leaves and briery vines. Moments went by unheeded, until at last a dim, gray light filtered through the darkness and the yellowish smoke from the distant fires. The light spread and spread, grew bright, then golden.
She came to herself again with the sunlight slanting through dead, leafless boughs, down into her pallid face, and, opening her dark eyes wide, she sat up and looked around.
She was couched in the pathless woods. She heard the faint whir of the pheasant’s wing, the plaintive call of the partridge, the low sough of the wind in the pine trees, but no human voice mixed with the echoes of woodland life.
She was stiff and sore, and her wet clothing clung to her limbs, a little steam arising from them in the sun’s warming rays.