Night came and the west faded. The solitary candle burned on, streaking the gloom with its meagre flame. For hours the girl watched on wide-eyed into the night, beside the inanimate carcass of her drunken sire. Ere dawn came she had fallen asleep in the window-seat with her head pillowed on her arm. And a smile played upon the lips of the woman who dreamed a dream.
A SPIRIT of unrest had fallen upon Gabriel Strong, a passionate discontent crying like a wild, prophetic voice out of the future. He was oppressed by numberless forebodings; his own heart piped dismally a traitorous refrain. A flippant levity served to cheat the curiosity of numberless excitable neighbors. Even John Strong believed his son to be in most excellent fettle and thoroughly enamoured of so passionate a bargain.
Judith, seraph of the pearly brow, had questioned her brother out of the deep tenderness of her love for him. Evening stood golden-bosomed in the west and a glimmering silence covered the world. The two were wandering over the Saltire lawns, swaying slowly side by side under the black arches of the yews and cedars.
Gabriel’s words had failed to satisfy the girl’s soul. Her doubts had found an echo in his brain; his desire for sympathy quickened his unrest. Stirred by the dogged melancholy that held him, she broke forth into an appeal, ardent as her heart’s blood, wistful as the wild music of a wind.
“For God’s sake, Gabriel,” she said, “play the man. What is the smart of a month compared to the misery of years. If you perjure yourself, you will do much to slay two souls.”
The man boasted an artificial strength that spoke with facile scorn.
“I am as happy as I can expect to be in this world,” he argued. “I have given up heroics, and intend to see things as they are. It is an error to meditate over one’s psychical inconsistencies. Always ask yourself whether you are happy, and you are doomed to be miserable.”
Judith was not the woman to be deluded with sophistry. She had convictions—convictions that could not live on air.
“You know very well whether you are happy or not,” she said.
“I have never arrived at any such conclusion since I began to think, eight years ago.”
“A soul never attains to happiness by theorizing.”