3
He went; and she was alone. The words of their conversation seemed still to be floating in the silence, like vanishing atoms. Then the silence became complete; and Cecile sat motionless, leaning back in the three little cushions of the sofa, black in her crape against the light of the lamp, her eyes gazing out before her. All around her a vague dream descended as of little clouds, in which faces shone for an instant, from which low voices issued without logical sequence of words, an aimless confusion of recollection. It was the dreaming of one on whose brain lay no obsession either of happiness or of grief, the dreaming of a mind filled with peaceful light: a wide, still, grey Nirvana, in which all the trouble of thinking flows away and the thoughts merely wander back over former impressions, taking them here and there, without selecting. For Cecile’s future appeared to her as a monotonous sweetness of unruffled peace, in which Dolf and Christie grew up into jolly boys, young undergraduates, men, while she herself remained nothing but the mother, for in the unconsciousness of her spiritual life she did not know herself entirely. She did not know that she was more wife than mother, however fond she might be of her children. Swathed in the clouds of her dreaming, she did not feel that there was something missing, by reason of her widowhood; she did not feel loneliness, nor a need of some one beside her, nor regret that yielding air alone flowed about her, in which her arms might shape themselves and grope in vain for something to embrace. The capacity for these needs was there, but so deep hidden in her soul’s unconsciousness that she did not know of its existence nor suspect that one day it might assert itself and rise up slowly, up and up, an apparition of more evident melancholy. For such melancholy as was in her dreaming seemed to her to belong to the past, to the memory of the dear husband whom she had lost, and never, never, to the present, to an unrealized sense of her loneliness.
Whoever had told her now that something was wanting in her life would have roused her indignation; she herself imagined that she had everything that she wanted; and she valued highly the calm happiness of the innocent egoism in which she and her children breathed, a happiness which she thought complete. When she dreamed, as now, about nothing in particular—little dream-clouds fleeing across the field of her imagination, with other cloudlets in their wake—sometimes great tears would well into her eyes and trickle slowly down her cheek; but to her these were only tears of an unspeakably vague melancholy, a light load upon her heart, barely oppressive and there for some reason which she did not know, for she had ceased to mourn the loss of her husband.
In this manner she could pass whole evenings, simply sitting dreaming, never wearying of herself, nor reflecting how the people outside hurried and tired themselves, aimlessly, without being happy, whereas she was happy, happy in the cloudland of her dreams.
The hours sped and her hand was too slack to reach for the book upon the table beside her; slackness at last permeated her so thoroughly that one o’clock arrived and she could not yet decide to get up and go to her bed.