CHAPTER XV.
It had not been continued resentment against Bates that had made Eliza refuse Miss Rexford's request; it was the memory of the kiss with which he had bade her good-bye. For two days she had been haunted by this memory, yet disregarded it, but when that night came, disturbed by Sophia's words, she locked out the world and took the thing to her heart to see of what stuff it was made.
Eliza lived her last interview with Bates over and over again, until she put out her light, and sat by her bedside alone in the darkness, and wondered at herself and at all things, for his farewell was like a lens through which she looked and the proportion of her world was changed.
There is strange fascination in looking at familiar scenes in unfamiliar aspect. Even little children know this when, from some swinging branch, they turn their heads downwards, and see, not their own field, but fairyland.
Eliza glanced at her past while her sight was yet distorted, it might be, or quickened to clearer vision, by a new pulse of feeling; and, arrested, glanced again and again until she looked clearly, steadily, at the retrospect. The lonely farm in the hills was again present to her eyes, the old woman, the father now dead, and this man. Bates, stern and opinionated, who had so constantly tutored her. Her mind went back, dwelling on details of that home-life; how Bates had ruled, commanded, praised, and chidden, and she had been indifferent to his rule until an hour of fear had turned indifference into hate. It was very strange to look at it all now, to lay it side by side with a lover's kiss and this same man her lover.
Perhaps it was a sense of new power that thrilled her so strangely. It needed no course of reasoning to tell her that she was mistress now, and he slave. His words had never conveyed it to her, but by this sign she knew it with the same sort of certainty we have that there is life in breath. She had sought power, but not this power. Of this dominion she had never dreamed, but she was not so paltry at heart but that it humbled her. She whispered to herself that she wished this had not been; and yet she knew that to herself she lied, for she would rather have obliterated all else in the universe than the moment in which Bates had said farewell. The universe held for her, as for everyone, just so much of the high and holy as she had opened her heart to; and, poor girl, her heart had been shut so that this caress of the man whose life had been nearly wrecked by her deed was the highest, holiest thing that had yet found entrance there, and it brought with it into the darkness of her heart, unrecognised but none the less there, the Heaven which is beyond all selfless love, the God who is its source. Other men might have proffered lavish affection in vain, but in this man's kiss, coming out of his humiliation and resignation, there breathed the power that moves the world.
She did not consider now whether Bates's suffering had been of his own making or hers. She was not now engaged in an exercise of repentance; compunction, if she felt it, came to her in a nervous tremor, a sob, a tear, not in intelligible thought. Her memory gave her pictures, and the rest was feeling—dumb, even within. She crouched upon the floor and leaned her head against the bedside. Dry, trembling sobs came at intervals, passing over her as if some outside force had shaken and left her again; and sometimes, in the quiet of the interval, her lips smiled, but the darkness was around. Then, at length, came tranquillity. Her imagination, which had been strained to work at the bidding of memory, in weariness released itself from hard reality, and in a waking dream, touched, no doubt, into greater vividness by hovering hands of Sleep, she found temporary rest. Dreams partake of reality in that that which is and that which might be, are combined in their semblance of life. Eliza saw the home she had so long hated and lived its life once more, but with this difference, that she, her new present self, was there, and into the old life she brought perforce what knowledge of the world's refinements she had gained in her year of freedom. The knowledge seemed to her much more important than it was, but such as it was, she saw it utilised in the log house, and the old way of life thereby changed, but changed the more because she, she the child Sissy, reigned there now as a queen. It was this idea of reigning, of power, that surely now made this dream—wild, impossible as she still felt it to be—pleasant. But, as she pondered, arranging small details as a stimulated imagination is wont to do, she became gradually conscious that if love were to reign long, the queen of love would be not only queen but slave, and, as by the inevitable action of a true balance, the slave of love would be a ruler too. This new conception, as it at first emerged, was not disagreeable. Her imagination worked on, mapping out days and months to her fascinated heart. Then Sleep came nearer, and turned the self-ordered dream into that which the dreamer mistook for reality. In that far-off home she saw all the bareness and roughness of the lonely life which, do what she would, she could not greatly alter; and there again Bates kissed her; she felt his touch in all its reality, and in her dream she measured the barrenness of the place against the knowledge that her love was his life.
The soul that lay dreaming in this way was the soul of a heavy-limbed, ungracious woman. She lay now on the floor in ungainly attitude, and all the things that were about her in the darkness were of that commonest type with which ignorance with limited resource has essayed to imitate some false ideal of finery, and produced such articles as furniture daubed with painted flowers, jute carpets, and gowns beflounced and gaudy. Yet this soul, shut off from the world now by the curtain of sleep, was spoken to by an angel who blended his own being into recollections of the day, and treated with her concerning the life that is worthy and the life that is vain.
Eliza awoke with a start. She raised herself up stiff and chilly. She looked back upon her dream, at first with confusion and then with contempt. She lit her lamp and the present was around her again.
"No, I will not go," she said to herself. The words had been conned in her fit of rudeness to Sophia Rexford that day, but now they had a wider meaning.
All sweet influences sent out from Heaven to plead with human hearts withdrew for the time, for—such an awful thing is life—we have power to repulse God.