In The Carquinez Woods | Page 8

shooting, swearing, drinking, smoking,
fighting Teresa! "Oh, yes; she had been loved, perhaps--who
knows?--but always feared. Why should she change now? Ha, he
should see."
She had lashed herself in a frenzy, as was her wont, with gestures,
ejaculations, oaths, adjurations, and passionate apostrophes, but with
this strange and unexpected result. Heretofore she had always been
sustained and kept up by an audience of some kind or quality, if only
perhaps a humble companion; there had always been some one she
could fascinate or horrify, and she could read her power mirrored in
their eyes. Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had
been something. But she was alone now. Her words fell on apathetic
solitude; she was acting to viewless space. She rushed to the opening,
dashed the hanging bark aside, and leaped to the ground.
She ran forward wildly a few steps, and stopped.
"Hallo!" she cried. "Look, 'tis I, Teresa!"
The profound silence remained unbroken. Her shrillest tones were lost
in an echoless space, even as the smoke of her fire had faded into pure

ether. She stretched out her clenched fists as if to defy the pillared
austerities of the vaults around her.
"Come and take me if you dare!"
The challenge was unheeded. If she had thrown herself violently
against the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken more
breathless than she was by the compact, embattled solitude that
encompassed her. The hopelessness of impressing these cold and
passive vaults with her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear. In
her rage of the previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound
immobility. Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns,
she trembled and turned faint. The silence of the hollow tree she had
just quitted seemed to her less awful than the crushing presence of
these mute and monstrous witnesses of her weakness. Like a wounded
quail with lowered crest and trailing wing, she crept back to her hiding
place.
Even then the influence of the wood was still upon her. She picked up
the novel she had contemptuously thrown aside, only to let it fall again
in utter weariness. For a moment her feminine curiosity was excited by
the discovery of an old book, in whose blank leaves were pressed a
variety of flowers and woodland grasses. As she could not conceive
that these had been kept for any but a sentimental purpose, she was
disappointed to find that underneath each was a sentence in an
unknown tongue, that even to her untutored eye did not appear to be the
language of passion. Finally she rearranged the couch of skins and
blankets, and, imparting to it in three clever shakes an entirely different
character, lay down to pursue her reveries. But nature asserted herself,
and ere she knew it she was asleep.
So intense and prolonged had been her previous excitement that, the
tension once relieved, she passed into a slumber of exhaustion so deep
that she seemed scarce to breathe. High noon succeeded morning, the
central shaft received a single ray of upper sunlight, the afternoon came
and went, the shadows gathered below, the sunset fires began to eat
their way through the groined roof, and she still slept. She slept even
when the bark hangings of the chamber were put aside, and the young

man reentered.
He laid down a bundle he was carrying and softly approached the
sleeper. For a moment he was startled from his indifference; she lay so
still and motionless. But this was not all that struck him; the face before
him was no longer the passionate, haggard visage that confronted him
that morning; the feverish air, the burning color, the strained muscles of
mouth and brow, and the staring eyes were gone; wiped away, perhaps,
by the tears that still left their traces on cheek and dark eyelash. It was
the face of a handsome woman of thirty, with even a suggestion of
softness in the contour of the cheek and arching of her upper lip, no
longer rigidly drawn down in anger, but relaxed by sleep on her white
teeth.
With the lithe, soft tread that was habitual to him, the young man
moved about, examining the condition of the little chamber and its
stock of provisions and necessaries, and withdrew presently, to
reappear as noiselessly with a tin bucket of water. This done, he
replenished the little pile of fuel with an armful of bark and pine cones,
cast an approving glance about him, which included the sleeper, and
silently departed.
It was night when she awoke. She was surrounded by a profound
darkness, except where the shaft-like opening made a nebulous mist in
the corner of her wooden cavern. Providentially she struggled back to
consciousness slowly, so that