The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Triumph Of Night, by Edith Wharton

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Title: The Triumph Of Night
1916

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: January 17, 2008 [EBook #24351]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

THE TRIUMPH OF NIGHT

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner's Sons

I

It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the
shivering young traveller from Boston, who had counted on jumping into
it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing
alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of night-fall
and winter.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung
forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen
silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge
against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. Dark, searching
and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a
bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts. This
analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had
no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively
temperate air of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the
bleak heights of Northridge. George Faxon said to himself that the place
was uncommonly well-named. It clung to an exposed ledge over the valley
from which the train had lifted him, and the wind combed it with teeth
of steel that he seemed actually to hear scraping against the wooden
sides of the station. Other building there was none: the village lay far
down the road, and thither--since the Weymore sleigh had not come--Faxon
saw himself under the necessity of plodding through several feet of
snow.

He understood well enough what had happened: his hostess had forgotten
that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had
been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the
visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those
whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that