Paths of Judgement

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

She could even imagine a sentimental bond growing between him and Angela. Angela was horrible enough for any cleverness. Her passion had a sincerity that would give life to any lie. She would twist facts into some becoming shape, build her bower and beckon Maurice into it. A shuddering seized her thoughts of Angela; she turned from them.

The rain now dashed on the window. The pallid memory of light was gone from the sky. Fold upon fold of deeper darkness covered it. The trees shook in the rising gusts of wind.

There was the turn of the road that she had often watched through so many years, longing for it to bring life to her. Well, she had had her wish. She had met her lions. She could not feel herself ennobled by her contests. It rather seemed that the lions had mangled her.

As she stood, pressing her forehead against the window and looking at the storm, she saw a figure, leaning to the steep ascent far down the road, a tall man’s figure under an umbrella.

Figures were few on the road, and, on such a day, a casual stroller improbable. Her heart leaped to a terror of Maurice coming in person to plead and expostulate. Impossible that her letter had not forbidden all pleading and expostulation. It could not be Maurice.

It was not, as she saw, with a drooping of the breath in a relief so great that she knew how great the foolish terror must have been, as the figure, after a momentary disappearance, came nearer in that turn of the road. The long waterproof, the slanted umbrella, still made identity a conjecture; but already the steady stride, the grave, decisive carriage had a familiarity that hurried a new and deeper fear on the first. Not Maurice; not her father; obviously not Uncle Cuthbert. Could it be Geoffrey?

Since the day before, Geoffrey had been for her a figure aureoled and pedestalled—strange transfiguration of the statesman statue!—lifted high, far away, in his almost saintly strength; a figure to be gazed at with thanksgiving for its smile upon herself; but still so strange in its new setting that any nearness of regret or tremor had not touched her.

But to see Geoffrey now—now that she was his—and knew it.—The thought shook her with regret, fear, unutterable sadness.

It was Geoffrey. She drew back from the window as he approached the house. Regret was for the past, sadness for the future, but the fear was for the present and it seized her like the storm. He was perhaps not so high, so aureoled, so saintly. Wild surmises flashed lightnings through her mind, that seemed to rock like an empty bird’s nest in a shaken tree. Had Maurice returned? Had he in a frenzy of anger or despair showed Geoffrey her letter? Had Geoffrey come to claim her on the strength of her own avowal?—come to claim her?—to take her away?

She had no time to analyze the terror of such surmises—what they implied of disillusion in him—or to look at the rapture that ran a dreadful radiance through terror and disillusion. That there should be rapture was perhaps the terror’s root. She heard him in the hall ridding himself of the dripping umbrella and waterproof. Why, after all, call it disillusion? Perhaps strength not less saintly than that of renunciation lay in a solemn claiming. His nobility had chained them. Might not nobility now break the chains? But could he break them? Was not her strength to be counted with? She was asking herself the final question—in a gasp—as he came in.