The master awoke the next morning, albeit after a restless night, with that clarity of conscience and perception which it is to be feared is more often the consequence of youth and a perfect circulation than of any moral conviction or integrity. He argued with himself that as the only party really aggrieved in the incident of the previous night, the right of remedy remained with him solely, and under the benign influence of an early breakfast and the fresh morning air he was inclined to feel less sternly even towards Seth Davis. In any event, he must first carefully weigh the evidence against him, and examine the scene of the outrage closely. For this purpose, he had started for the school-house fully an hour before his usual time. He was even light-hearted enough to recognize the humorous aspect of Uncle Ben's appeal to him, and his own ludicrously paradoxical attitude, and as he at last passed from the dreary flat into the fringe of upland pines, he was smiling. Well for him, perhaps, that he was no more affected by any premonition of the day before him than the lately awakened birds that lightly cut the still sleeping woods around him in their long flashing sabre-curves of flight. A yellow-throat, destined to become the breakfast of a lazy hawk still swinging above the river, was especially moved to such a causeless and idiotic roulade of mirth that the master listening to the foolish bird was fain to whistle too. He presently stopped, however, with a slight embarrassment. For a few paces before him Cressy had unexpectedly appeared.
She had evidently been watching for him. But not with her usual indolent confidence. There was a strained look of the muscles of her mouth, as of some past repression, and a shaded hollow under her temples beneath the blonde rings of her shorter hair. Her habitually slow, steady eye was troubled, and she cast a furtive glance around her before she searched him with her glance. Without knowing why, yet vaguely fearing that he did, he became still more embarrassed, and in the very egotism of awkwardness, stammered without a further salutation: "A disgraceful thing has happened last night, and I'm up early to find the perpetrator. My desk was broken into, and"--"I know it," she interrupted, with a half-impatient, half uneasy putting away of the subject with her little hand--"there--don't go all over it again. Paw and Maw have been at me about it all night--ever since those Harrisons in their anxiousness to make up their quarrel, rushed over with the news. I'm tired of it!"
For an instant he was staggered. How much had she learned! With the same awkward indirectness, he said vaguely, "But it might have been YOUR letters, you know?"
"But it wasn't," she said, simply. "It OUGHT to have been. I wish it had"-- She stopped, and again regarded him with a strange expression. "Well," she said slowly, "what are you going to do?"
"To find out the scoundrel who has done this," he said firmly, "and punish him as he deserves."
The almost imperceptible shrug that had raised her shoulders gave way as she regarded him with a look of wearied compassion.
"No," she said, gravely, "you cannot. They're too many for you.
You must go away, at once."
"Never," he said indignantly. "Even if it were not a cowardice.
It would be more--a confession!"
"Not more than they already know," she said wearily. "But, I tell you, you MUST go. I have sneaked out of the house and run here all the way to warn you. If you--you care for me, Jack--you will go."
"I should be a traitor to you if I did," he said quickly. "I shall stay."
"But if--if--Jack--if"--she drew nearer him with a new-found timidity, and then suddenly placed her two hands upon his shoulders: "If--if--Jack--I were to go with you?"
The old rapt, eager look of possession had come back to her face now; her lips were softly parted. Yet even then she seemed to be waiting some reply more potent than that syllabled on the lips of the man before her.
Howbeit that was the only response. "Darling," he said kissing her, "but wouldn't that justify them"--"Stop," she said suddenly. Then putting her hand over his mouth, she continued with the same half-weary expression: "Don't let us go over all that again either. It is SO tiresome. Listen, dear.
You'll do one or two little things for me--won't you, dandy boy?
Don't linger long at the school-house after lessons. Go right home! Don't look after these men TO-DAY--to-morrow, Saturday, is your holiday--you know--and you'll have more time. Keep to yourself to-day as much as you can, dear, for twelve hours--until--until--you hear from me, you know. It will be all right then," she added, lifting her eyelids with a sudden odd resemblance to her father's look of drowsy pain, which Ford had never noticed before.
"Promise me that, dear, won't you?"
With a mental reservation he promised hurriedly--preoccupied in his wonder why she seemed to avoid his explanation, in his desire to know what had happened, in the pride that had kept him from asking more or volunteering a defence, and in his still haunting sense of having been wronged. Yet he could not help saying as he caught and held her hand:--"YOU have not doubted me, Cressy? YOU have not allowed this infamous raking up of things that are past and gone to alter your feelings?"
She looked at him abstractedly. "You think it might alter ANYBODY'S feelings, then?"
"Nobody's who really loved another"--he stammered.
"Don't let us talk of it any more," she said suddenly stretching out her arms, lifting them above her head with a wearied gesture, and then letting them fall clasped before her in her old habitual fashion. "It makes my head ache; what with Paw and Maw and the rest of them--I'm sick of it all."
She turned away as Ford drew back coldly and let her hand fall from his arm. She took a few steps forward, stopped, ran back to him again, crushed his face and head in a close embrace, and then seemed to dip like a bird into the tall bracken, and was gone.
