"Oh, stop! stop! How dare you!" she cried; "for he tried to shield you—he tried to shield you—he would shield you if he could."
But he crossed to where she stood and caught her outstretched hands in a grasp that hurt her. She winced, and his hold grew gentle; but his voice was brutal in its passion.
"Be silent," he said, "and listen to me. They have lied to you, and you have believed them—you I shall never forgive—you are nothing to me—nothing. As for him—may God, in his mercy, damn him!"
He let her hands drop and went from her into the silence of the open road.
When the thud of his footsteps was muffled by the distance Eugenia turned and went back through the cedar avenue. She walked heavily, and there was a bruised sensation in her limbs as if she had hurt herself upon stones. A massive fatigue oppressed her, and she stumbled once or twice over the rocks in the road. Her happiness was dead, this she told herself; telling herself, also, that it had not perished by anger or by disbelief. The slayer loomed intangible and yet inevitable—the shade that had arisen from the gigantic gulf between separate classes which they had sought, in ignorance, to abridge. The pride of Nicholas was not individual, but typical—the pride of caste, and it was against this that she had sinned—not in distrusting his honour, but in offending it. It was in the clash of class, after all, that their theories had crumbled. He might come back to her again—she might go forth to meet him—but the bloom had gone from their dreams—in the reunion she saw neither permanence nor abiding. The strongest of her instincts—the one that made for the blood she bore—had quivered beneath the onslaught of his accusation, but had not bent. Wherever and whenever the struggle came she stood, as the Battles had always stood, for the clan. Be it right or wrong, true or false, it was hers and she was on its side.
As she went beneath the great cedars, their long branches brushed her face, like the remembering touch of familiar fingers, and she put up her cheek to them as if they were sentient things. Long ago they had soothed her as a troubled child, and now their caresses cooled her fever. Underfoot she felt the ancient carpet they had spread throughout the century—and it smoothed the way for her heavy feet. She was in the state of subjective passiveness when the consciousness of external objects alone seems awake. She felt a tenderness for the twisted box bushes she brushed in passing, a vague pity for a sickly moth that flew into her face; but for herself she was without pity or tenderness—she had not brought her mind to bear upon her own hurt.
Indoors she found the family at supper. The general, hearing her step, called her to her seat and gave her the brownest chicken breast in the dish before him. Miss Chris offered her the contents of the cream jug, and Congo plied her with Aunt Verbeny's lightest waffles; but the food choked her and she could not eat. A lump rose in her throat, and she saw the kindly, accustomed faces through a gathering mist. She regarded each with a certain intentness, a peculiar feeling that there were hidden traits in the commonplace features which she had never seen before—a complexity in the benign candour of Miss Chris's countenance, in the overwrought youthfulness of Bernard's, in the apoplectic credulity of the general's. Familiar as they were, it seemed to her that there were latent possibilities—obscure tendencies, which were revealed to her now with microscopic exaggeration.
The general put his hand to her forehead and smoothed back the moist hair.
"Ain't you well, daughter?" he asked anxiously. "Would you like a toddy?"
"It's nothing," said Miss Chris cheerfully. "She's walked too far, that's all. Eugie, you must go to bed early."