Chapter XVII.
All this while Lucy had been waiting anxiously in her chamber in the turret.
As twilight faded, she took her farewell of river, slopes, groves, and mountains. With dying day, all that beloved scene sank deeper into her memory.
At last Voltaire came and whispered: “They are come. Be ready when I call!”
She was ready; and now, in these few moments, before she blew out her light and departed, she studied the familar objects about her with new affection.
It seemed to her as if all the observation of her past life had been half-conscious and dreamy.
The sudden ripening of her character, by this struggle with evil, gave all her faculties force.
Commonplace objects were no longer commonplace. Everything in her room became invested with a spiritual significance.
“Good bye, my dear old mirror!” she thought. “You have given me much dumb sympathy when I smiled or wept. You could not answer my tearful questions, why my innocent life must be so dreary. I begin to comprehend at last the Myself you have helped me to study. Good bye, my bedside! I had no mother’s lap to rest my head on when I prayed. But your cool, white cushion never repelled me, whether I knelt in doubt or in agony. Good bye, my pillow! thanks for many a night of oblivion! thanks for many an awakening with hope renewed! Good bye, kind, sheltering walls of my refuge! The child you have known so long is a woman. Girlhood ends sharply here. The woman says, Good bye.”
As she stood waiting for the signal of flight, suddenly her mother’s cry of alarm broke the silence.
At that ill-omened voice, Lucy trembled, and for one moment despaired.
Then came the sharp crack of the pistol-shot.
The shock startled her into courage. This note of battle joined awaked all the combatant in her. “I cannot hide here,” she thought, “while they are in danger for my sake. I cannot fight, but I may help, if any one is hurt.”
One more glance about her chamber, and then she closed the door, and shut herself out into the wide world.
At the top of the staircase, the sound of a struggle below met her. She paused, and shuddered. Not for fear. Timidity seemed to be expunged from the list of her possible emotions. She shuddered for horror.
She recognized her mother’s voice. She heard those bedlam cries and curses. These were the tones of a woman who had ejected the woman, and was a wild beast. Feminine reserve had dropped at last, and the creature appeared what her bad life had slowly made her.
“What final horror has done this?” thought Lucy.
She leaned cautiously over the banisters, and beheld the scene in the hall. A sickening sight for a daughter to see! A strange scene in that proud and orderly house! Outward decorum, at least, had always reigned there. Evil had now, at last, undergone its natural development into violence.
Pale and shivering with excitement, but conscious of a new-born sense of justice and an inexorable hardness of heart against guilt, Lucy leaned forward, and saw her mother struggling with the two men. She saw the alarmed negroes. She saw the gentleman, whom she identified at a glance as the expected hero, and heard his grave voice as he ordered Plato to make her horse ready and Voltaire to seek herself.
“A dreadful end of all this sorrow and sin!” she heard him say.
Lucy repeated these words to herself in a whisper. “A dreadful end! What does he mean? I do not see my father. Can it be? Did she fire the shot? Has she murdered the body, as she has done her best to kill the soul?”
Lucy sprang down the stairs, by Voltaire, and into the dining-room.
There sat Major Kerr, drivelling entreaties to his impassive sentry.
And on the floor, with a stream of blood flowing over his temple and clotting his gray hair, lay a man, — her father!
Sappho was moaning over him.
Lucy flung her aside, almost fiercely. She crushed her own great cry of anguish. She knelt by him and lifted the reverend head with her arms.
And so it happened that when Edwin Brothertoft, stunned by a sharp blow from a glanced bullet and by his heavy fall, in a moment came to himself and unclosed his eyes, he saw his daughter’s face hanging over him, and felt her arms about his neck. Her tender arms embracing him, — her lips at his.
Ah, moment of dear delight! when life renewed perceived that love was there to welcome it and to baptize its birth with happy tears!
Here Jierck Dewitt reappeared upon the scene.