Dolly was hurt by her doubt. 'Indeed I do,' she answered, beginning to cry once more, from fatigue and excitement.
One of the two women in that midnight room was young, with the new kindling genius of love in her heart, and she was weeping; the other was old, with the first knell of death ringing in her ear; but when Dolly looked up at last she saw that her aunt was smiling very tenderly. Lady Sarah smiled, but she could not trust herself to speak. She had awakened startled, but in a minute she had realised it all. She had felt all along that this must be. She had not wished for it, but it was come. It was not only of Dolly and of Robert that Lady Sarah thought that night; other ghosts came into the room and stood before her. And then came every day, very real, into this dream-world—Marker with a bed-chamber candlestick, walking straight into conflicting emotions, and indignant with Miss Dolly for disturbing her mistress. She had been shutting up and seeing to Mrs. Palmer's coffee. She was scarcely mollified by the great news. Lady Sarah was awake; Dolly had awakened her.
'Let people marry who they like,' said Marker; 'but don't let them come chattering and disturbing at this time o' night, when they should a' known better.
CHAPTER XXVI.
GOOD-MORNING.
Qu'un jeune amour, plein de mystère,
Pardonne à la vieille amitié.
Dolly passed through the sleeping house, crept by the doors, slid down the creaking stairs, into the hall. The shutters were unopened as yet, the dawning day was bolted out, and the place was dark and scattered over with the shreds of the day before. A newspaper was lying on the hall table, pieces of string upon the ground, a crumpled letter, and the long brown-paper coffin in which the silk for her new gown had come home the night before. Each day scatters its dust as it hurries by, and leaves its broken ends and scraps for the coming hours to collect and sort away, dust of mind, and dust of matter. The great kaleidoscope of the world turns round once in its twenty-four hours; the patterns and combinations shift and change and disperse into new combinations. Perhaps some of us may think that, with each turn, the fragments are shaken up and mixed and broken away more and more, until only an undistinguishable uniform dazzle remains in place of the beautiful blue and red and golden stars and wheels that delighted our youth.
Dorothea gave a cautious pull to the bolt of the outer door and opened it, letting a sudden sweet chill rush of light and fresh air into the closed house, where they had all been asleep through the night. What a morning! All her sudden fears seemed lightened, and she jumped across the step on to the gravel walk, and looked up and round and about. Dark green, gold, glistening bricks, slanting lights, and sweet tremulous shadows; the many crowding house-roofs and tree-tops aflame in the seven-o'clock sunshine, the birds flapping and fluttering, the mellow old church clock striking seven: the strokes come in solemn procession across the High Street and the old brick-walled garden, and pass on I don't know to what distant blue realms in the vault overhead.
She stopped to look at a couple of snails creeping up among the nails in the wall. I think she then practised a little mazourka along the straight garden walk. She then took off her hat and stopped to pin back some of the russet of which I have spoken, then she looked up again and drew a great breath; and then, passing the green beech and the two cut yew-trees, she came to the placid pond in its stone basin at the end of the garden. There it lay in its darkness and light. There were the gold-fish wide-awake, darting and gaping as they rose to the surface; and the water reflected the sky and the laurel-bushes, and the chipped stone edge of the basin. When Dorothea came and looked over the brink she saw her own smiling, disjointed face looking up at her. It was not so bright a face as her own, somehow. It looked up grey and sad from out of this trembling, mystical looking-glass. What was it? A cloud passing overhead, a little, soft, fleecy, white cloud bobbing along, and then some birds flying by, and then a rustle among the leaves. It was only a moment, during which it had seemed to her as if the throb of nature beat a little more slowly, and as if its rhythm had halted for an instant; and in that moment the trouble of the night before, the doubt of herself, came back to her. Sometimes Dorothea had wondered, as others have done before her, if there is such a thing as real happiness in nature. Do clouds love to sail quickly on the wind? Are pools glad to lie placid refracting the sunshine? When the trees rustle, is it just a chatter and a quiver, or the thrill of life answering life? The thought of a living nature without consciousness had always seemed to her inexpressibly sad. She had sometimes thought how sad a human life might be that was just a human life, living and working and playing, and coming to an end one day, and falling to the ground. It was, in truth, not very unlike the life she might have led herself, and now—now she was alone no longer. There was a meaning to life now, for Henley loved her. She thought this, and then, seeing a spider's web suddenly gleam with a long lightning flash, she turned with another glad spring of youth to the light.