Aching in every nerve, Caroline undressed and threw herself into bed. The hardest day of nursing had never left her like this—had never exhausted her so utterly in body and mind. She felt as if she had been beaten with rocks; and beneath the sore, bruised feeling of her limbs there was the old half-forgotten quiver of humiliation, which brought back to her the vision of that autumn morning at The Cedars—of the deep blue of the sky, the shivering leaves of the aspens, and the long straight road drifting through light and shadow into other roads that led on somewhere—somewhere. Could she never forget? Was she for ever chained to an inescapable memory?
"Is you 'bleeged ter go?" inquired the old woman, stopping again in her packing.
"Yes, I'm obliged to go. I wouldn't stay now if they went down on their knees to me."
"You ain't mad wid Marse David, is you?"
"No, I'm not angry with Mr. Blackburn. He has been very kind to me, and I am sorry to leave Letty." For the first time the thought of the child occurred to her. Incredible as it seemed she had actually forgotten her charge.
"She sutney is gwine ter miss you."
"I think she will, poor little Letty. I wonder what they will make of her?"
Closing her eyes wearily, she turned her face to the wall, and lay thinking of the future. "I will not be beaten," she resolved passionately. "I will not let them hurt me." Some old words she had said long ago at The Cedars came back to her, and she repeated them over and over, "People cannot hurt you unless you let them. They cannot hurt you unless you submit—unless you deliver your soul into their hands—and I will never submit. Life is mine as much as theirs. The battle is mine, and I will fight it." She remembered her first night at Briarlay, when she had watched the light from the house streaming out into the darkness, and had felt that strange forewarning of the nerves, that exhilarating sense of approaching destiny, that spring-like revival of her thoughts and emotions. How wonderful Mrs. Blackburn had appeared then! How ardently she might have loved her! For an instant the veiled figure of her imagination floated before her, and she was tormented by the pang that follows not death, but disillusionment. "I never harmed her. I would have died for her in the beginning. Why should she have done it?"
Opening her eyes she stared up at the wall beside her bed, where Mammy Riah's shadow hovered like some grotesque bird of prey.
"Did you order the car, Mammy Riah?"