Of course she could always go back to the hospital, if she could walk there, for now she had not the price of another bus ride left. Yes, she could go back and grovel before Mr. and Mrs. Weston and disgrace her family forever. She could go back, and perhaps they would be glad to have Dudley marry her. She had heard that they said they wanted Dudley to marry young. She shuddered. She did not want to marry Dudley. She never wanted to see him again. That ride had cured her. She would never, never willingly go near him again. There were unspeakable things he had said and done on that awful ride that were burned into her memory and would always be there. She felt she would never be really happy again in this world. Yes, she could go back to the hospital and borrow money from Mrs. Weston. But she would rather to go over to one of those looming cliffs across the river and fling herself in than do that!
Having uttered that fiercely in her heart she went out into the snowy avenue, garlanded with holly and mistletoe, bordered with hemlocks and spruce and pine, filled with happy people going home with last packages. Christmas cheer everywhere and only Betty Thornton left out!
She turned around the corner and sought that pawnshop.
And then they gave her only ten dollars for her watch, her precious platinum watch with the little diamonds set about it. Would she ever see it again? Betty Thornton pawning her watch, her last year’s Christmas gift from her father, to get money to go home!
“And when he had spent all. And when he had spent all!” Where had she heard that phrase, and why did it keep ringing over and over in her head now?
It had grown very dark while she was in the pawnshop. The old man with a hooked nose and a scraggly beard had kept her waiting a long time before he told her what he would give her for the watch, and when she faltered and told him it was very valuable and ought to bring more than that he swept it aside and told her he had more watches now than he knew what to do with, and people never came back for the things they pawned anyway. So she told him hastily that she would accept it and that she meant to send for her watch the very next day after Christmas!
When she came out of the shop the lights bewildered her, and she took the wrong turn and wandered eight or nine blocks out of her way before she discovered it. Frightened, she turned back again. She began to remember how her mother was afraid to have her out alone at night in city streets, and a strange kind of fright took possession of her. Betty Thornton, the little hard-boiled high school sport, was frightened all alone by herself in New York! She tried to shame herself out of it, but the tremor remained until at last she straggled into the great station, too weary to hardly drag one foot after the other.
It was fortunate perhaps that she should have gone to the restaurant before finding out what a ticket to the village below the farm would cost. But she was ready to drop with faintness and felt that food was the first consideration.
And then she was too weary to eat what she had ordered. She could only eat a little of the soup. When she tried the chocolate ice cream and the coconut cake that she had ordered, she found them too sweet, and the cold sent shivers down her back again. Her feet felt wet and cold, and her throat was decidedly sore now. Sore she was from head to foot, with a blinding headache.
When she gave up trying to eat and went to buy a ticket she found to her horror that she had not money enough to take her home.
She spread her money out before the ticket agent. There was a long line of impatient travelers behind her waiting their turn. “That’s all I have left,” she said. “How far will it take me?” The man counted it with a practiced eye.
“Take you to Weldon,” he said. “That’s thirty miles this side Wentworth.”
The woman behind Betty reached out a gloved hand with a twenty-dollar bill clutched in it and waved it impatiently at the man behind the window:
“I want to get that next train!” she said in a loud tone. “All right!” said Betty wearily, “I’ll go to Weldon.” She had to wait nearly an hour for the next train. When she finally crept into a stuffy seat in the second-class car and curled up with her head on the window seat, she was too tired to think at all. She just wanted to keep still and try to endure the terrible pain in her back and the terrible ache in her head and the great mountain of a lump in her throat when she swallowed.
Fitfully she slept, apathetically she endured the hard seat, and the twist that came in her neck and shoulder from lying down against the windowsill, the chill that came from the crack under the window.
As the night went on the car grew very cold. If it had not been for her fur coat she would have perished. She was too far down in the depths of weariness and despondency to question what she should do in the morning. She had not even inquired what hour her train reached Weldon. It is doubtful if she would have taken in the added catastrophe if she had known it was due there at four o’clock in the morning.
However, a kindly overheated bearing delayed the train an hour and a half, and it was not until half past five that a long-suffering conductor hunted her up and shook her gently, though gruffly, telling her it was time to get out.
She stood dazedly on the platform of the little closed station and watched her train amble away into the white darkness of the chill before the dawn. When its last red twinkle died into the darkness she turned around and looked about her.
Everything was still and dark. There seemed to be no one about anywhere. White arc lights blazed overhead with that appalling brilliance that lights can assume in a deserted station in a lonely spot at unearthly hours. Little white houses with green shuttered windows huddled along a straggling street. The snow had fallen anew here, too, for all the trees were outlined in white velvet and stood out against the dark like the nerves of a skeleton. There was almost an uncanny stillness over the white dark world. And not a soul in sight!
Betty tried the door of the station. It was locked. Dim lights were burning inside. Perhaps someone slept there. But though she pounded on the door till her knuckles ached it brought no response.
The telegraph machine clicked away to itself: “Cluck-cluck-cluck! Cluck!—Cluck!” Like a deaf old man who was snoring and would not listen. A little mouse inside ran across the station floor, and its plush feet echoed like a clatter in the empty room. It was weird.
In despair she turned away and walked to the end of the platform.
There was an arc light here and a signpost. She came nearer and read it: WENTWORTH 41 MILES! A finger pointed out through the village on a road well rutted by vehicles.
Chapter 25
She looked back at the station looming in the dark, with no seats offering friendly help. Not even a packing box to sit on! What should she do? She couldn’t stand here till daylight. One lonely place was no better than another. Why not start on? She would be warmer than standing here in the wind.
So with feet that were stiff and sore from her day’s walking, with flimsy shoes that were scarcely more than half-dry, with silk stockings of gauzy film, she stepped out into the snow and started on her journey. Forty-one miles! And then three on top of that to the farm! Would she be able to make it? Oh, if she only had her galoshes that she left behind the wastepaper basket in the waiting room in Springfield, years and years and years ago!
The new-fallen snow was soft and feathery, and the track had not yet been beaten through it. As she put her foot down, it would sink in some places up to her ankles. Her shoe was low cut, and the snow rushed in beneath her instep and nestled about her foot with a chilling embrace that was sickening. She became more conscious of her sore throat and her aching head, and with a wild thought of plunging through and getting somewhere quickly she started to run.
But running in a rough road was a most uncertain matter, and more than once she lost her footing and fell. Once she pitched sideways into a drift and plunged her arms into the snowbank beyond their depth. It was not easy to rise again, and when she did she found there was snow inside her sleeves and up her arms.
The hour too was almost uncanny, gray dawn fighting w
ith the rising day, the streets of the little town deserted as if the inhabitants were long dead. She rose and fled along once more, now gaining a footing on a sidewalk that offered firmer walking. Here she could stamp the snow out of her shoes and shake it out of her sleeves. She even stood on one foot at a time and took off her shoes and emptied them, brushing off the snow from her icy feet. That made her feel a little more comfortable. And so she hurried on.
But even the sidewalks came to an end very soon, as the houses grew fewer and farther apart. At last she came to the beginning of the open country again. The sidewalk ended abruptly, in a great drift of snow like a barrier that must be surmounted before she could get into the road again. She was in despair. How could she go on? Her feet were terribly cold, and if they got wet again they would surely freeze stiff.
She retraced her steps till she came to a house where the way had been cleared in front of a gate to the road and a stepping-stone bridged the curb. She stood poised an instant before stepping out again into that horrible cold mass and tried to think of something she might do to keep her feet from actually freezing. If she only hadn’t been too proud to wear her galoshes!
She was wearing a scarf of soft silk, long and wide, and very gauzy in texture, painted over with flowers. It had been a gift on her last birthday, and in her extravagant love of show she had been wearing it to school the day she was taken away. She looked at it now, dubiously, her lovely scarf! But it must be sacrificed. She would freeze if she did not do something.
Ruthlessly she unwound it from her neck and tore it in two. Then sitting down on the horse block, with a furtive glance toward the still-sleeping frame house set back from the road, she took off her little shoes and carefully wound each foot with the scarf. It took several experiments before she was able to get her foot back into her shoe with the added folds of silk, but at last she stumbled up to her feet again and started on. For a little while she did feel more comfortable, although the lumpy folds of silk make it hard to walk. But her feet were getting so numb now that a little thing like that did not seem to matter so much.
She had gone what seemed to her about ten miles, stumbling and falling, slipping back each step sometimes, till it seemed she made little progress, when she came at length to another signpost. Eagerly she read the mileage: WENTWORTH 39 MILES. All this long, cold, terrible way, and she had gone only two miles! How could she ever get there? Her feet were absolutely numb now. They were so cold that stinging pains were going up her limbs. She had a feeling that before long her feet would be frozen solid like icicles, and perhaps snap off at some careless step, and leave her lying there in the road with no one to know.
All at once home and Mother and Father and her siblings loomed large and dear in her life. Suppose she should die there in that lonely road, and not be found for days, and word never even get to her family that she had died. Strangers would pick her up and take her to the morgue!
She shuddered and plunged forward again with a sickening feeling that she must, even though it was no use. Every step she got nearer to Wentworth meant that much more of a chance that they would at least know sometime that she had tried to come home.
A wind had risen, gradually, blowing the snow around and flinging it into her face sharply, stingingly. It bit into her like venomous insects and added one more source of discomfort.
She had reached the top of a hill where the fields on either side were windswept and barren and where the snow had drifted over the fence tops and obliterated the lines of them completely. It had even eddied across the road, obliterated the tracks of the last few weeks, and wiped out the way for some distance into a smooth blanket of deep white. She paused at the brow of the hill and looked across in new dismay to the vague lines of snowcapped fences in the distance and tried to determine just where the road might be.
She took a few steps forward and found that the drifts were not so deep, that she could plunge through provided she kept in the track of the road. But the least misstep brought her down in snow beyond her depth. Then she would look back and try to get her bearings again, but the downward trend of the road had carried her out of sight of the fences behind, and she had nothing to guide her except that vast expanse of whiteness ahead going down to the valley, with vague tracings like quilting in a patchwork of snowfields.
Nevertheless she tried bravely to stumble on, frightened and weary. It seemed as though her heart was a pump that would not work, and her breath hurt in her chest, and stung maddeningly in her nostrils, as she labored.
The snow was growing deeper now, and she realized that she must be off the road again, or else the drifts were deeper. How was she ever to go on? Her feet felt like leaden weights, and once or twice when she fell she stayed down in the snow for a moment to rest and get her breath again. The pain in her throat was like a knife cutting when she tried to swallow, and her head ached as if it were going to burst. The tears were rolling down her cheeks, blinding her at times, yet she was not conscious of crying. Once she put up her hand to see why her cheeks were so cold and found the tears frozen on her lashes and her face.
It was just then, bewildered and frightened, that a new predicament arose. She had stepped into snow a little deeper than she had yet found, and her numb feet refused to lift themselves and go another step. It was as if they had suddenly been turned to stone, loaded with lead, and all the efforts of the brain and heart could not make them take another futile step in that deadly white way.
Crying out at last with a weak little bleat like a lost lamb, Betty leaned forward with her hands against the snow to make one last effort and plunged forward, her arms sinking in to the shoulders. Snow inside her sleeves, snow inside all her garments, snow against her bare flesh! Snow that felt warm like a blanket compared to the chill of her flesh! Good snow! Kind snow! She lay upon it like a tired child in the arms of a great mother.
She thought of the stories she had read of quicksand and people sinking to their death. But this was not quicksand. It was more like a mammoth feather bed in which she was sinking, sinking down, and would soon be out of sight. If she opened her eyes she could look across the snow and down to those interminable white fields stretching their vastness away to the rim of the world and no help anywhere. She had taken herself out of the realm of her family, the only ones in the wide world who really loved her! Betty! A lost lamb on the snowy mountain.
The gray morning came up, with a sullen sky, the morning that was to have been Christmas Day, and Betty Thornton lay out alone on a billow of snow, slowly freezing to death.
She had read that people freezing to death did not suffer pain. It was true, then. She was satisfied to lie here and rest. The things that hurt, her chilled feet, the aching in her back, and the pull on her tired limbs and heart, were gone. Even the sting of the cold in her nostrils was not so bad when she did not have to breathe much, and her throat did not hurt so much if she did not try to swallow. She would go to sleep a little while, and perhaps when she woke up the sun would shine and the snow would be melted at least enough to show her the way.
She closed her eyes with a little sob and let her body rest down in the feathery bed of snow, and suddenly she could hear the family singing the old song, down in the living room of the farmhouse. Chris’s baritone and Daddy’s tenor. Jane singing also and Mother carrying the soprano all alone, her voice sounding weak and trembling like a sob in the end of the words, and Betty not there to help! She tried to open her lips and sing. Perhaps they would hear her and come to help her out. But when the sound came out in a little cracked squeak her throat hurt her so terribly that she had to give it up. But what were those words they were singing, the words she had formed with her lips but could not utter?
“While I draw this fleeting breath,
When my eyelids close in death,
When I rise to worlds unknown,
See Thee on Thy judgment throne.”
Then she was dying. This was almost her last breath! Her eyelids were closing in death, and she wa
s going to an unknown world. There would be a judgment throne, and she would be tried for all the things she had done that were wrong and for all the things she ought to have done that were right. And God would be there!
Suddenly she knew that God was there now, out there in the white fields just beyond; that He had been out there all the time looking at her in His kind, sad way, watching how far she had gone away from home. She had tried to get away from Him but she had only got away from those she knew and loved, and God who frightened her had come along. She could not get away from God!
She could hear her father praying now with agonized tones, kneeling on the snow out there, with his head bowed and tears in his voice, or was it in the living room at the farm he was kneeling?
She was not sure. It was not at home in Briardale, she was sure of that, for he never prayed in Briardale except sometimes in church, a very formal polite prayer that had not seemed like prayer at all and had not bothered her in the least. But he was praying now, in tones that tore her young heart: “Oh God, find my little Betty! Save my little Betty!” She could hear it over and over again, with the tears in his voice, and her mother sobbing in between; Jane sobbing too, and Chris wiping his eyes—and even little Doris and John crying, kneeling there beside the old sofa and crying, or was it out in the snow? She could not tell. Strange that she could see them all so plainly, hear them, too, and she could not make herself known to them. But perhaps she was already dead. Her feet were dead, anyway. It was a long time since she had felt them at all. And there was something packed away inside her lungs that made it hard to breathe. It hurt like a knife now when she tried.
And God was out there yet. She had not opened her eyes but He was there! Yes, she must be dead already, and this was the judgment God had come for. So, there was a God after all! The teachers in high school had not known. Was Dudley dead, too? Did he know, too, that there was a God? Would they be judged together for what they had tried to do?