Mrs. Hancock had passed out of the dining-room on the quest for the longer paragraphs in the Morning Post, and for a moment the two girls faced each other. Elizabeth was still quivering with indignation at Edith's first wanton attack, the attack which sounded so friendly and pleasant a salutation and which both knew was so far otherwise. And if Edith only knew what wrestlings, what blind strivings after light Elizabeth had undergone for her....
"Don't scold him too much," she said. "He is so nice. I love Edward! Shall I drive with Aunt Julia this afternoon, or would you like to?"
Elizabeth ran upstairs to her room and locked herself in. Already she was sick at heart for her barren dexterity. She had pricked Edith with her point, made her wince, startled her into miserable silence. And what was the good of it all? It did not even for the moment allay the savage anguish of her own wound. She threw herself on her bed and sobbed.
By soon after eight she had finished her dinner and was sitting in the drawing-room, neither writing to her father nor practising. For the last half-hour she had had one overpowering sensation in her mind, which absorbed the active power of thought, and spread itself like a dense enveloping mist, obscuring all other perceptions—namely, the knowledge that in the house next door Edward sat alone, or perhaps walked in the garden, longing to catch sight of her over the low brick wall. She, too, would have spent this hour of darkening twilight outside but for fear of seeing him, or more exactly but for the longing to see him which she must starve and deny. No doubt she would have to see him, have to listen to his pleading; but it was part of her resolve that she would use all her will to hold herself apart. But the thought of him possessed her, and she could not concentrate her mind enough even to attempt to practise or to write her overdue letter. It had taken all her nervous force to arrive where she was; now, like a bird after the flight of migration, she had to rest, to let the time go by, without stirring up her activities; for any activity she roused seemed to be directed from the cause of purpose that excited it, and to be sucked into the mill-race that but ran the swifter for an added volume of awakened perception.
Soon mere inactivity became even more impossible than employment, and she opened the piano. The wonder of music, which his love had so magically quickened in her, perhaps would not desert her even now, and she set herself to study the intellectual as well as the technical intricacies of Brahms' variations on the Handel themes. If she could give them any attention at all, she felt she could give them her whole attention; it was impossible merely to paddle knee-deep in that profound and marvellous sea; you had either to swim, or not enter it at all. She bent her mind to her work, as a man bends the resisting strength of a bow. She would string it; she willed that it should bend itself to its task.
How marvellous was this artistic vision! To the composer, the theme was like some sweet, simple landscape, a sketch of quiet country with a stream, perhaps, running through it. Then he set himself to see it in twenty different ways. He saw it with gentle morning sunshine asleep over it; he saw it congested with winter, green with the young growth of spring, triumphant in the blaze of summer, and gorgeous with the flare of the dying year. He saw it with rain-clouds lowering on its hills and swelling its streams with gathered waters; he saw it underneath the lash of rain, and echoing to the drums of thunder; he saw it beneath the moonlight, and white with starshine on snow.
Suddenly Elizabeth held her hands suspended over the keys, and in her throat a breath suspended. Through the maze of melody she had heard another sound, faint and tingling, that pierced through the noise of the vibrating strings. A bell had rung. Hearing it, she knew that unconsciously she had been listening for it with the yearning with which the eyes of the shipwrecked watch for a sail.
There were steps in the hall, a few words of indistinguishable talk, and she turned round on her music-stool and faced the door. It opened, whispering on the thick carpet, and Edward stood there.
In silence he held out both hands to her, and she rose. But she did not advance to him, or he to her.
She felt her lip trembling as she spoke.