a labyrinth of streets, making hair-breadth escapes, dashing between taxis, scuttling down dark alleys, and across vacant lots; once diving through a garage in mad haste with the hope of finding a car he could hire, and then afraid to ask any one about it. And all the time something in his soul was lashing him with scorn. Coward! Coward! it called him. Bearing a lofty name, wearing the insignia of wealth and culture, yet too low to go back and face his mistakes and follies, too low to face the woman he had robbed of her child and tell her how sore his own heart was, and confess his sin. [Pg 29] Murray Van Rensselaer had been wont to boast that he was not afraid of anything. But he was afraid now! He was fleeing from the retribution that he was sure was close upon his footsteps. Something in his heart wanted to go back and do the manly thing, but could not! His very feet were afraid and would not obey. He had no power in him to do anything but flee! [Pg 30] [Pg 30] IV Sometime in the night he found himself walking along a country road. How he got there or what hour it was he did not know. He was wearier than he had ever been in his life before. The expensive shoes he was wearing were not built for the kind of jaunt he had been taking. He had been dressed for an afternoon of frivolity when he started out from home. There had been the possibility of bringing up almost anywhere before dinner-time, and he had not intended a hike when he dressed. His shoes pierced him with stabs of pain every step he took. They were soaked with water from a stream he had forded somewhere. It was very hazy in his mind whether the stream had been in the gutter of the city where the escape from a fire-engine had been flooding down the street or whether he had sometime crossed a brook since he left the outskirts of town. Either of these things seemed possible. The part of him that did the thinking seemed to have been asleep and was just coming awake painfully. He was wet to the skin with perspiration, and was exhausted in every nerve and sinew. He wanted nothing in life so much as a hot shower and a bed for twenty-four hours. He was hungry and thirsty. Oh! Thirsty! He would give his life for a drink! Yet he dared not try to find one. And now he knew it had been a brook he had waded, for he remembered stooping down and lapping water from his hand.[Pg 31] But it had not satisfied. He wanted something stronger. His nerves under the terrible
Prev.
Back
Top