Her father's dreamy ways; the selfishness, heartlessness, empty-headedness of Mrs. Carteret; the distaste she felt for James Dugdale's presence, though she persuaded herself she was striving to be grateful;--all these things, separately and collectively, she felt, but they did not present themselves to her as the true sources of her present uncontrollable feelings: she knew how utterly she was changed now only when she knew--for it was knowledge, not apprehension--that the home to which she had found her way of access so much easier than she had thought for, could never be a resting-place for her.
Was there any resting-place anywhere? Had she still to learn that life's lessons are not exhausted by one or two great shocks of experience, but are daily tasks until the day, "never so weary or long," has been "rung to evensong"? She was a puzzle to herself in another respect. No grief for the dead husband, the lover for whom she had left the home which could not be restored, had come back to her. No gentle tender chord had been touched in her heart, to give forth his name in mournful music.
In this, the truth, the intellectual strength of her nature, unknown to her, revealed themselves. No sentimentality veiled the truth from Margaret. She had said to herself that it was well for her her husband was dead, no matter what should come after, and she never unsaid it,--not even in the hours of emotional recollection and mental strife which formed her first night under her father's roof.
Standing by the window at which James Dugdale had first caught sight of her the day before, Margaret clasped her hands over her head and looked out drearily. The moon was high, the light was cold and ghastly. She thought how she had seen the same chill gleam upon the shimmering sea, and upon the grassy wastes of the distant land she had left; and the fancy came to her that it was to be always moonlight with her for evermore.
"No more sunshine; no more of the glow, and the glitter, and the warmth--that is done with for me. There's no such thing as happiness, and I must only try to find, instead, hard work."
There was another wakeful head at Chayleigh that night. James Dugdale was but too well accustomed to sleepless nights, companioned by the searching, mysterious pain which so often attends upon deformity--pain, as if unseen fingers questioned the distorted limbs and lingered among the disturbed nerves; but it was not that which kept him waking now.
It was that he, too, was face to face with his fate, questioning it of its past deeds and its intentions for the future--a little bitterly questioning it, perhaps, and yet with more resignation than rancour after all, considering what the mind of the man was, and what a prison-house it tenanted. Among the innumerable crowd of thoughts which pursued and pressed upon each other, there was one all the more distinct that he felt and strove against its unworthiness.
"I am so thankful she is at home--so glad for her sake. Nothing could be so well for her, since the past is irrevocable; but nothing could be so bad, at least nothing could be worse for me. No, nothing, nothing."
And James Dugdale, happily blind to the further resources of his destiny, felt something like a dreary sense of peace arising within him as he assured himself over and over again of the finality to which it had attained.