This probable desire of
Charlotte's for love and marriage in itself, apart from him, thrilled
his male fancy with a certain holy awe and respect, from his love for
her and utter ignorance of the attitude of womankind. Then, too, he
reflected that Thomas Payne would probably make her a good husband.
"He can buy her everything she wants," he thought, with a curious
mixture of gratulation for her and agony on his own account. He
thought of the little bonnets he had meant to buy for her himself,
and these details pierced his heart like needles. He sobbed, and the
birch-tree quivered in a wind of human grief. He saw Charlotte going
to church in her bridal bonnet with Thomas Payne more plainly than he
could ever see her in life, for a torturing imagination reflects life
like a magnifying-glass, and makes it clearer and larger than
reality. He saw Charlotte with Thomas Payne, blushing all over her
proud, delicate face when he looked at her; he saw her with Thomas
Payne's children. "O God!" he gasped, and he threw himself down on
the ground again, and lay there, face downward, motionless as if fate
had indeed seized him and shaken the life out of him and left him
there for dead; but it was his own will which was his fate.
"Barney," his father called, somewhere out in the field. "Barney,
where be you?"
"I'm coming," Barney called back, in a surly voice, and he pulled
himself up and pushed his way out of the thicket to the ploughed
field where his father stood.
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