The corroboration of the fact was stronger to him than the fact itself.He understood the coldness, the uncongeniality now--the simulated increase of her aversion to Demorest--her journeys to Boston and Hartford to see her relatives, her acquiescence to his frequent absences; not an incident, not a characteristic of her married life was inconsistent with her guilt and her deceit.He went even back to her maidenhood: how did he know this was not the legitimate sequence of other secret schoolgirl escapades.The bitter worldly light that had been forced upon his simple ingenuous nature had dazzled and blinded him.He passed from fatuous credulity to equally fatuous distrust.
He stopped suddenly with the roaring of water before him.In the furious following of his rapid thought through storm and darkness he had come, he knew not how, upon the bank of the swollen river, whose endangered bridge Demorest had turned from that evening.Afew steps more and he would have fallen into it.He drew nearer and looked at it with vague curiosity.Had he come there with any definite intention? The thought sobered without frightening him.
There was always THAT culmination possible, and to be considered coolly.
He turned and began to retrace his steps.On his way thither he had been fighting the elements step by step; now they seemed to him to have taken possession of him and were hurrying him quickly away.
But where? and to what? He was always thinking of the past.He had wandered he knew not how long, always thinking of that.It was the future he had to consider.What was to be done?
He had heard of such cases before; he had read of them in newspapers and talked of them with cold curiosity.But they were of worldly, sinful people, of dissolute men whose characters he could not conceive--of silly, vain, frivolous, and abandoned women whom he had never even met.But Joan--O God! It was the first time since his mute prayer on the staircase that the Divine name had been wrested from his lips.It came with his wife's--and his first tears! But the wind swept the one away and dried the others upon his hot cheeks.
It had ceased to rain, and the wind, which was still high, had shifted more to the north and was bitterly cold.He could feel the roadway stiffening under his feet.When he reached the pavement of the outskirts once more he was obliged to take the middle of the street, to avoid the treacherous films of ice that were beginning to glaze the sidewalks.Yet this very inclemency, added to the usual Sabbath seclusion, had left the streets deserted.He was obliged to proceed more slowly, but he met no one and could pursue his bewildering thoughts unchecked.As he passed between the lines of cold, colorless houses, from which all light and life had vanished, it seemed to him that their occupants were dead as his love, or had fled their ruined houses as he had.Why should he remain? Yet what was his duty now as a man--as a Christian? His eye fell on the hideous facade of the church he was passing--her church! He gave a bitter laugh and stumbled on again.