She took up the letter, held it to the candle, and let it burn slowly on the hearth.
To-morrow she would write to him the last word of parting.
"I will bear it, and bear it till death. But how long it will be before death comes!
I am so young, so healthy.
How shall I have patience and strength?
Am I to struggle and fall and repent again?
Has life other trials as hard for me still?"
With that cry of self-despair, Maggie fell on her knees against the table, and buried her sorrow-stricken face.
Her soul went out to the Unseen Pity that would be with her to the end.
Surely there was something being taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?
"O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort––"
At that moment Maggie felt a startling sensation of sudden cold about her knees and feet; it was water flowing under her.
She started up; the stream was flowing under the door that led into the passage.
She was not bewildered for an instant; she knew it was the flood!
The tumult of emotion she had been enduring for the last twelve hours seemed to have left a great calm in her; without screaming, she hurried with the candle upstairs to Bob Jakin's bedroom.
The door was ajar; she went in and shook him by the shoulder.
"Bob, the flood is come! it is in the house; let us see if we can make the boats safe."
She lighted his candle, while the poor wife, snatching up her baby, burst into screams; and then she hurried down again to see if the waters were rising fast.
There was a step down into the room at the door leading from the staircase; she saw that the water was already on a level with the step.
While she was looking, something came with a tremendous crash against the window, and sent the leaded panes and the old wooden framework inward in shivers, the water pouring in after it.
"It is the boat!" cried Maggie.
"Bob, come down to get the boats!"
And without a moment's shudder of fear, she plunged through the water, which was rising fast to her knees, and by the glimmering light of the candle she had left on the stairs, she mounted on to the window-sill, and crept into the boat, which was left with the prow lodging and protruding through the window.
Bob was not long after her, hurrying without shoes or stockings, but with the lanthorn in his hand.
"Why, they're both here,–both the boats," said Bob, as he got into the one where Maggie was.
"It's wonderful this fastening isn't broke too, as well as the mooring."
In the excitement of getting into the other boat, unfastening it, and mastering an oar, Bob was not struck with the danger Maggie incurred.
We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger, and Bob's mind was absorbed in possible expedients for the safety of the helpless indoors.
The fact that Maggie had been up, had waked him, and had taken the lead in activity, gave Bob a vague impression of her as one who would help to protect, not need to be protected.
She too had got possession of an oar, and had pushed off, so as to release the boat from the overhanging window-frame.
"The water's rising so fast," said Bob, "I doubt it'll be in at the chambers before long,–th' house is so low.
I've more mind to get Prissy and the child and the mother into the boat, if I could, and trusten to the water,–for th' old house is none so safe.
And if I let go the boat–but you," he exclaimed, suddenly lifting the light of his lanthorn on Maggie, as she stood in the rain with the oar in her hand and her black hair streaming.
Maggie had no time to answer, for a new tidal current swept along the line of the houses, and drove both the boats out on to the wide water, with a force that carried them far past the meeting current of the river.
In the first moments Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she had suddenly passed away from that life which she had been dreading; it was the transition of death, without its agony,–and she was alone in the darkness with God.
The whole thing had been so rapid, so dreamlike, that the threads of ordinary association were broken; she sank down on the seat clutching the oar mechanically, and for a long while had no distinct conception of her position.
The first thing that waked her to fuller consciousness was the cessation of the rain, and a perception that the darkness was divided by the faintest light, which parted the overhanging gloom from the immeasurable watery level below.
She was driven out upon the flood,–that awful visitation of God which her father used to talk of; which had made the nightmare of her childish dreams.
And with that thought there rushed in the vision of the old home, and Tom, and her mother,–they had all listened together.
"O God, where am I?
Which is the way home?" she cried out, in the dim loneliness.
What was happening to them at the Mill?
The flood had once nearly destroyed it.
They might be in danger, in distress,–her mother and her brother, alone there, beyond reach of help!
Her whole soul was strained now on that thought; and she saw the long-loved faces looking for help into the darkness, and finding none.
She was floating in smooth water now,–perhaps far on the overflooded fields.
There was no sense of present danger to check the outgoing of her mind to the old home; and she strained her eyes against the curtain of gloom that she might seize the first sight of her whereabout,–that she might catch some faint suggestion of the spot toward which all her anxieties tended.
Oh, how welcome, the widening of that dismal watery level, the gradual uplifting of the cloudy firmament, the slowly defining blackness of objects above the glassy dark!
Yes, she must be out on the fields; those were the tops of hedgerow trees.
Which way did the river lie?