The Devil

In his struggles to free himself from the new mental growth, he had turned to his children. Instinct seemed to say that from them and through them should come an influence sufficiently potent to resist temptation, however tremendous. He felt so proud of the boy. Billy was never afraid of him, looked at him so firmly even when threatened, holding up the pink and white face, with its soft unformed features and yet a determined set to the chin and mouth already--a real little man. Dale took his son's hand in his, took Billy with him into the granary, the hay loft, or across the fields, cut bits of willow and showed how to make a whistle, took a hedge sparrow's nest and blew the eggs; and the boy was proud and happy in such noble society, but he could not exorcise the evil spell for his grand companion.

Nor could Rachel give freedom. Dale embraced his daughter with the truest paternal fervor, pumping up sweet clean love from deep unsullied wells, thinking honestly and as of old so long as she stood by his side. At such moments he forced himself to imagine a man playing the fool with Rachel, and immediately there came a full normal explosion of parental rage; and he knew, without the possibility of doubt, that such a man had better never have been born than encounter Rachel's father. But these imaginations could not help him. Thoughts about Rachel and thoughts about Norah, which once had mingled, were now like two rivers running side by side but never meeting.

Again, what had rendered the fight hopeless was his recognition of the overwhelming fact that the spell was mutual. It was not only that he wanted her, Norah wanted him. There lay the sweetly venomous throb of the poison. In her eyes he was not old; his gray hair did not appall her, his rugged frame did not repel her. All night and all day, during months, yes, during years, she had told him: "You are not old; you need not be old; I can make you young."

He thought, as he had thought again and again, of her artlessness, her ignorance, and her total absence of compunction. It seemed so wonderful. She drifted toward him as the petal of a flower comes on running water, as corn seeds blow through the air, as anything small and light obeying a natural law. She did not in the least understand social conventions. She was not troubled with one thought of right or wrong; she neither meditated nor remembered. How wonderful. The ten commandments and the catechism that she knew by heart, all the hymns she had sung and all the sermons she had heard, did not exert the faintest restraining influence. They had no real meaning for her probably, and she could not therefore bring them into relation with concrete facts. In her innocence, in her virginal simplicity, she would keep the book of life close--sealed until he opened it roughly for her at its ugliest page.