It had all dated, alas! from a village wedding—or alas or not alas—she had never thought to give it a sigh till now. Zephyr the god, coming over the hill, had taken Chloris unawares amongst her flowers; and the way of a god was not woman’s guilt, but joy. Shame could not come to blossom from that divine condescension. For its sake, she had even stiffened to something of a precisian in questions of maidenly decorum.
And now? The sigh, wafted from that distant scene, had overtaken her at last. Those weddings, those weddings! Chaste procurers to the unchaste. How men took advantage—of their feasts and dancings, of beating pulses and warm proximities, of the sense of neighbouring consummations—to plead the dispensations of the hour! Recalling that plea, her god seemed all at once to reveal himself a mortal thing, and subject to the mortal laws of change. She felt no longer secure in him through her own unchanging faith. Her faith was shaken.
The glory of the morning fields; blown blue skies and the squirt of milk into pails; the cosy sweetness of ricks; pigeons, and the click of pattens on dewy tiles; a voice singing, far away in the sunny window of a dairy,
“All the tears Saint Swithin can cry,
Saint Bartlemey’s mantle shall wipe ’em dry”—
such memories had but figured hitherto for the dim background, sweet and a little pathetic, to a more poignant pastoral. Now, all of a sudden, they were the commanding poignancy, infinitely haunting, infinitely remote, and for ever and ever, as realities, irrecoverable. Was all St Bartlemey’s mantle equal to drying the well of tears which she felt gathering in her soul? The darkness of a great apprehension was on her—a spectre, formless but menacing, in the thrall of whose shadow she saw herself separated by a lifeless dumb abyss from her living past. How had she crossed it unknowing, that deadly gulf? There had seemed to her no break in the continuity of past and present; until, lo! in an instant her eyes had been opened, and she knew herself for a derelict in a desert, crying to a fading mirage.
What had happened, so to blind her eyes, obliterate space, cancel all time? A consciousness of guilt, the very first, stole in to answer. Love, whom she had scorned, had betrayed her—had led her on, revenging that slight, to the very threshold of a brothel, and there abandoned her.
And his protégé, for whom he had done this thing? A chawbacon gallant, the very antipodes of the other—but then Love was born in Arcady, and favours a rustic wooer. Poor Reuben’s homely image rose before her—heroic hobnails, sentiment in a smock, but honest and clear-seeing within the limits of his vision. Reuben had seen, and dared to expostulate—and been smartly caned by Cartouche for his presumption. And Reuben had blubbered—that was fatal. A crying man is always contemptible. Yet in what other way, their relative ranks considered, could he have answered to those flips of Fate? Privilege, in these days, kept the stocks and gallows up its sleeve for the correcting of any such ebullitions on the part of a mutinous commonalty. The odds were disproportionate, and Reuben could only express his sense of that in tears.
Poor Reuben! what had become of him? Cured his harrowed heart, belike, with dressing of Joan or Betty. She wished she knew—could reclaim herself to the past with even that much of certain knowledge, and comfort. How he must hate her memory! She felt very deserted and forlorn.
And all about what? Ask love, when in its nerves it feels the first faint false harmonic jar within a perfect song; forehears the strife of notes which that one cracked seed of discord must come to germinate. Sure ear; sure prophecy; sure sorrow. The sound of M. Saint-Péray’s first footfall on her threshold had been that fatal dissonance to Molly. Somehow, by some sad and mystic intuition, she had felt her hymn of happy days a broken sequence from that moment.