But it was all subconsciously that this woman followed the varying shades and tones of color in the sunset of grays and golds, and if by a strangely divided intelligence she noted the physical changes that were being wrought in the world outside her, her thoughts within surged in a great ocean, of feeling against the cold and desolate shore that now bounded life for her. Otherwise, as she stood there at the close of this fateful day, and saw the gold grow brighter and the pink deepen to crimson, she might easily have worked out a poetic analogy between that little sunset, with the convent tower to give it gloom, and her own life; she would have done so once, and found a sweet exquisite sadness in it, but now—a grief at last had come to her too real and too tragic in its great reality for any such romanticism, a grief that sounded deeper than any tears.
Other griefs could be borne; they could be voiced; they could find comfort in the ministrations of sympathetic friends, in the consolations of religion; more than all in the healing balm that nature stores in the woods and fields. But here was a grief that was the more intense because she had so long dreaded it, known it even, though she had fought the recognition off, and never admitted it to herself before. She saw all that now, and it made clear so many little passages in her later life; passages that had been dark to her, and filled with vague troubles.
Here was a grief that was no new thing, but an old thing, that had been there all the time, like some fatal disease; she had felt its pains and it had put its restraints and its limitations and its renunciations upon her; now it had been correctly diagnosed at last, that was all; and it could not be changed, nor cured, nor alleviated even; but she must bear it alone and in silence, walking straight-lipped and dry-eyed the long way that stretched before.
In some such mode as this her thoughts had been rushing on ever since that moment downstairs in the afternoon when the whole truth had been at last revealed to her. She had thought it out along every line she could trace; she had analyzed and synthesized; she had viewed it from every possible standpoint; she had built up elaborate schemes of repair, of rehabilitation; she had planned a new life to be begun when the wreck of the old had been cleared away by forgiveness and new resolve; but in the end, it had all come to the same remorseless conviction—her faith had been destroyed, it lay dead at her feet; nothing could ever change that fact any more.
The colors were slowly dying out of the narrow strip of sky along the horizon and it had become opalescent and serene with evening. A new life seemed suddenly to awake in the world below her. A robin, that should have been in bed, went springing across the yard, swelling its red breast, and Emily was vaguely conscious of wondering if it were the one she had heard that afternoon singing in the rain. Something moved her to raise the window, something in the new and vital pulse that thrilled the world.
With the inrushing air came the sickening odor of the late-flowering locust tree, and there were borne to her as well the gentle sounds of evening, the endless trilling of insects in the wet grass; the lowing of a cow; by and by the belated crow of some rooster. The world was alive and awake; it seemed to be stretching itself after its long prostration in the rain, and now it enjoyed this breath of keen air before it went to sleep, impatient for the hopeful morning when it might take up once more its glad ambitious life. But for her—so Emily’s thoughts ran—there was no hope and no to-morrow.
The sun had trailed the last of his splendors across that narrow opening in the sky. The opalescence swam into a new sea of silver, then suddenly a bar of yellow broke it, there was a rush of violet, then purple shadows dissolved the convent tower and the sky closed, cold and dark and still. And there came into Emily’s mind the lines:
“Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain.
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight, Never glad confident morning again!”
She closed her window and turned wearily away. She had her duties, her little duties; John Ethan was calling, and the supper was to be laid; life somehow after all must be lived.
She was going down the stairs, when suddenly from the little habits of existence that persist sometimes ludicrously, sometimes irritatingly, sometimes comfortingly, even in the most tragic moments of life, she thought of the evening papers lying at that moment damp and limp against the front door. The primaries—she stopped and steadied herself by the baluster—what had been the result of the primaries? She shook her head impatiently for thinking of them in that moment. What were primaries to her now? And yet—would he win?