The Greater Inclination

At daylight a sound in Lydia’s room woke Gannett from a troubled sleep.  He sat up and listened.  She was moving about softly, as though fearful of disturbing him.  He heard her push back one of the creaking shutters; then there was a moment’s silence, which seemed to indicate that she was waiting to see if the noise had roused him.

Presently she began to move again.  She had spent a sleepless night, probably, and was dressing to go down to the garden for a breath of air.  Gannett rose also; but some undefinable instinct made his movements as cautious as hers.  He stole to his window and looked out through the slats of the shutter.

It had rained in the night and the dawn was gray and lifeless.  The cloud-muffled hills across the lake were reflected in its surface as in a tarnished mirror.  In the garden, the birds were beginning to shake the drops from the motionless laurustinus-boughs.

An immense pity for Lydia filled Gannett’s soul.  Her seeming intellectual independence had blinded him for a time to the feminine cast of her mind.  He had never thought of her as a woman who wept and clung:  there was a lucidity in her intuitions that made them appear to be the result of reasoning.  Now he saw the cruelty he had committed in detaching her from the normal conditions of life; he felt, too, the insight with which she had hit upon the real cause of their suffering.  Their life was “impossible,” as she had said—­and its worst penalty was that it had made any other life impossible for them.  Even had his love lessened, he was bound to her now by a hundred ties of pity and self-reproach; and she, poor child! must turn back to him as Latude returned to his cell….

A new sound startled him:  it was the stealthy closing of Lydia’s door.  He crept to his own and heard her footsteps passing down the corridor.  Then he went back to the window and looked out.

A minute or two later he saw her go down the steps of the porch and enter the garden.  From his post of observation her face was invisible, but something about her appearance struck him.  She wore a long travelling cloak and under its folds he detected the outline of a bag or bundle.  He drew a deep breath and stood watching her.

She walked quickly down the laurustinus alley toward the gate; there she paused a moment, glancing about the little shady square.  The stone benches under the trees were empty, and she seemed to gather resolution from the solitude about her, for she crossed the square to the steam-boat landing, and he saw her pause before the ticket-office at the head of the wharf.  Now she was buying her ticket.  Gannett turned his head a moment to look at the clock:  the boat was due in five minutes.  He had time to jump into his clothes and overtake her—­

He made no attempt to move; an obscure reluctance restrained him.  If any thought emerged from the tumult of his sensations, it was that he must let her go if she wished it.  He had spoken last night of his rights:  what were they?  At the last issue, he and she were two separate beings, not made one by the miracle of common forbearances, duties, abnegations, but bound together in a noyade of passion that left them resisting yet clinging as they went down.

After buying her ticket, Lydia had stood for a moment looking out across the lake; then he saw her seat herself on one of the benches near the landing.  He and she, at that moment, were both listening for the same sound:  the whistle of the boat as it rounded the nearest promontory.  Gannett turned again to glance at the clock:  the boat was due now.

Where would she go?  What would her life be when she had left him?  She had no near relations and few friends.  There was money enough … but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial.  He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste.  No one would understand her—­no one would pity her—­and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid….

He saw that she had risen from the bench and walked toward the edge of the lake.  She stood looking in the direction from which the steamboat was to come; then she turned to the ticket-office, doubtless to ask the cause of the delay.  After that she went back to the bench and sat down with bent head.  What was she thinking of?

The whistle sounded; she started up, and Gannett involuntarily made a movement toward the door.  But he turned back and continued to watch her.  She stood motionless, her eyes on the trail of smoke that preceded the appearance of the boat.  Then the little craft rounded the point, a dead-white object on the leaden water:  a minute later it was puffing and backing at the wharf.

The few passengers who were waiting—­two or three peasants and a snuffy priest—­were clustered near the ticket-office.  Lydia stood apart under the trees.

The boat lay alongside now; the gang-plank was run out and the peasants went on board with their baskets of vegetables, followed by the priest.  Still Lydia did not move.  A bell began to ring querulously; there was a shriek of steam, and some one must have called to her that she would be late, for she started forward, as though in answer to a summons.  She moved waveringly, and at the edge of the wharf she paused.  Gannett saw a sailor beckon to her; the bell rang again and she stepped upon the gang-plank.

Half-way down the short incline to the deck she stopped again; then she turned and ran back to the land.  The gang-plank was drawn in, the bell ceased to ring, and the boat backed out into the lake.  Lydia, with slow steps, was walking toward the garden….

As she approached the hotel she looked up furtively and Gannett drew back into the room.  He sat down beside a table; a Bradshaw lay at his elbow, and mechanically, without knowing what he did, he began looking out the trains to Paris….