LVIII
And now Sophy descended into the darkness of darkness where death and remorse sit brooding together—that vasty cavern of uttermost black gloom which underlies the Valley of the Shadow. Faith does not walk there nor hope. There a thousand years seem not as a day, but a day seems as a thousand years.
As she watched beside her son, she felt a more rending anguish than when she had given him birth, for now her soul was in travail of him. She who had given him life might now have given him death. If he died it would be she who had killed him. "Happiness hunter ... happiness hunter...." her own phrase rang in her mind.
And this was what her son had come to, while she was absorbed in hunting happiness....
She would not leave him now even long enough to change her clothes. Nurse Fleming brought her some fresh linen and a dressing-gown to the bedside, and put them on her as if she had been a child. She submitted quietly. The nurse unbound her hair, brushed and plaited it, then made her take an easy chair that she rolled up.
When Bellamy entered again Sophy roused from her tranced watching long enough to ask him to get Anne Harding if it were possible. He went at once to do so.
There was no night or day to Sophy now. The grim, candle-lit hours went by monotonous as a linked chain paid out of darkness into darkness by invisible hands.
Then came intervals of horror—struggles for breath. Wild shadows on the ceiling as nurse and doctor fought together with that other Shadow.
Anne Harding came. Sophy stared at her blindly, and said: "I thought you'd come, Cecil...."
Then after many days, each as a thousand years, a voice came through the smothering blackness in her mind. It said: