CHAPTER LXIX.

THE SOUL'S DANGER.

How, and by what way, that poor young creature came out on the verge of the Black Lake she could not have told. When she came down those balcony steps she had left the world behind her. Filled with an insane idea of self-martyrdom, she went onward and onward as rudderless boats reel through a storm.

Now she stood among the rushes--clouds over her head, a great sea of inky waters weltering away from her feet--gloom and blackness everywhere. The old lake house flung down uncouth shadows on one hand, a gnarled oak pushed its gaunt limbs far over the waters on the other. The rushes around her swayed and moaned in the wind like living things in pain.

Was it this weird picture that brought Ruth to a sense of her own condition? Did it seem to her as if she had already accomplished her purpose, and was entering upon its punishment? Who can answer for the impulses of a soul in its passions of distress? No two events are alike in all the tumultuous actions of life. When the destinies of a human being can be turned by a chance thought, a careless word, even a sunbeam, more or less, what intellect can fathom the exact thing that sways it for good or evil? One might have thought that the gloom of this picture would intensify the dark resolve that had urged that young creature on to death. Instead of that, it came upon her with a great shock, and she stood there among the rushes appalled.

Was it by that dark way she could hope to find her father?

As she asked this question an awful fear came upon her. She walked slowly backward, with her eyes fixed upon the water, breathing heavier and heavier, as the rushes swayed to their place between her and them. Thus she drew away from the awful danger to the threshold of the lake house. There she sat down.

What was this thing she had promised to do? A great crime which would shut her out from her father's presence forever and ever, which would make it impossible to meet her young husband through all eternity. She was willing to die for him--the agony was nothing. Had she not suffered more than that over and over again? But to give him up here and beyond those black waters was more than she could force upon her soul.

Beyond all this, the delicate organism of her being shrunk from that which might come to her body after death. She saw, as if it were a real presence, herself sinking, sinking down into the blackness of those waters, her limbs, so full of life now, limp and dead, tangled in the coarse grasses, or seized upon by some undercurrent, and dragged down into the depths of the earth. Worse still, coarse men might, with mistaken kindness, search the waters, and lift her from them in the very presence of her husband; who would see the face he had kissed swollen, the sodden lengths of her hair trailing the--the--

She could not bear these thoughts; they made existence itself unreal. She pushed the hair back from her face, as if expecting to find it dripping; she lifted both hands to her lips and laughed aloud when she found them dry. She folded both arms over her bosom and clasped herself in, sobbing out her relief that he had been saved from the anguish of seeing her dead. But not the less was she doomed. It was not the sacrifice that she shrunk from, but the crime. This moral force kept the girl back from her fate, but in no way lessened the spirit of self-abnegation that had brought her to the lake. Only how would she carry that into effect without crime? How could she take herself out of the way and be dead to every one that she loved? The fearful necessities of her case gave vigor to each thought, as it passed through her mind, and these thoughts were taking vague form, when the sounds of footsteps and of voices, speaking low and at intervals, startled her. Looking through the darkness she saw two forms coming down the brief descent along which a path led to the lake house. She had risen, and was looking for some place of refuge when a voice reached her, and darting around the old building she stole up the bank and away through the wildness.

It was the voice of Richard Storms.

Ruth went back to the cottage and searched the darkened rooms for the desk in which her father had kept his money. She placed what was found there in her pocket, with the key which had let her through the park-gate on that other eventful day of her life, and went out into the night again. She reached the gate, turned the lock, and taking the highway, walked rapidly toward the nearest railroad station.

A train was in sight. She had scarcely time to secure a ticket when it swept up to the platform. The guard half pushed her into a second-class car, and she was borne away toward London.

There in the solitude which seems most forlorn, she fell into a trance, in which all the faculties of her mind were self-centred--all the information she had ever received from her father or any other source presented itself for her use.

She would not save even her own husband by a crime. That idea she put utterly aside, knowing that to live was a choice of deeper suffering and more cruel martyrdom. But she must be dead to him--dead to the whole world. Her name, humble as it was, should not betray her. She would go, no matter where, but so far as the money in her pocket would allow. Her father had sometimes talked of places beyond the great ocean, where people of small means, or made desperate from misfortune, sought a new life. All that she had read of such places came vividly to her remembrance--how people went on shipboard, and were months and months out to sea, where they were happy enough to die sometimes. Perhaps God would be so merciful to her.

With these thoughts taking form in her mind Ruth found herself in London.