CHAPTER V
BITTERNESS
In the night, after a restless sleep, she awoke in terror. A hundred incidents, a hundred phrases, looks, gestures, which she had thought meaningless until last evening, flashed out of the darkness and hung there, blazing, against the background of the night. Yesterday these things had appeared purposeless; and now it seemed to her that only her incredible blindness, only her childish inability to face any painful fact until it struck her between the eyes, had kept her from discovering the truth before it was thrust on her by the idle chatter of strangers. A curious rigidity, as if she had been suddenly paralyzed, passed from her heart, which seemed to have ceased beating, and crept through her limbs to her motionless hands and feet. Though she longed to call out and awaken Oliver, who, complaining of insomnia, spent the night in the adjoining room, this immobility, which was like the graven immobility of death, held her imprisoned there as speechless and still as if she lay in her coffin. Only her brain seemed on fire, so pitilessly, so horribly alive had it become.
From the street beyond the dim square of the window, across which the curtains were drawn, she could hear the ceaseless passing of carriages and motor cars; but her thoughts had grown so confused that for a long while, as she lay there, chill and rigid under the bed-clothes, she could not separate the outside sounds from the tumult within her brain. "Now that I know the truth I must decide what is best to do," she thought quite calmly. "As soon as this noise stops I must think it all over and decide what is best to do." But around this one lucid idea the discordant roar of the streets seemed to gather force until it raged with the violence of a storm. It was impossible to think clearly until this noise, which, in some strange way, was both in the street outside and within the secret chambers of her soul, had subsided and given place to the quiet of night again. Then gradually the tempest of sound died away, and in the midst of the stillness which followed it she lived over every hour, every minute, of that last evening when it had seemed to her that she was crucified by Oliver's triumph. She saw him as he came towards her down the shining corridor, easy, brilliant, impressive, a little bored by his celebrity, yet with the look of vital well-being, of second youth, which separated and distinguished him from the curious gazers among whom he moved. She saw him opposite to her during the long dinner, which she could not eat; she saw him beside her in the car which carried them to the theatre; and clearer than ever, as if a burning iron had seared the memory into her brain, she saw him lean on the railing of the box, with his eyes on the stage where Margaret Oldcastle, against the lowered curtain, smiled her charming smile at the house. It had been a wonderful night, and through it all she had felt the iron nails of her crucifixion driven into her soul.
Breaking away from that chill of terror with which she had awakened, she left the bed and went over to the window, where she drew the heavy curtains aside. In Fifth Avenue the electric lights sparkled like frost on the pavement, while beyond the roofs of the houses the first melancholy glow of a winter's sunrise was suffusing the sky with red. While she watched it, a wave of unutterable loneliness swept over her—of that profound spiritual loneliness which comes to one at dawn in a great city, when knowledge of the sleeping millions within reach seems only to intensify the fact of individual littleness and isolation. She felt that she stood alone, not merely in the world, but in the universe; and the thought that Oliver slept there in the next room made more poignant this feeling, as though she were solitary and detached in the midst of limitless space. Even if she called him and he came to her, she could not reach him. Even if he stood at her side, the immeasurable distance between them would not lessen.
When the morning came, she dressed herself in her prettiest gown, a violet cloth, with ruffles of old lace at the throat and wrists; but this dress, of which she had been so proud in Dinwiddie that she had saved it for months in order to have it fresh for New York, appeared somehow to have lost its charm and distinction, and she knew that last evening had not only destroyed her happiness, but had robbed her of her confidence in the taste and the workmanship of Miss Willy. Knowledge, she saw now, had shattered the little beliefs of life as well as the large ones.
Oliver liked to breakfast in his dressing-gown, fresh from his bath and eager for the papers, so when he came hurriedly into the sitting-room, the shining tray was already awaiting him, and she sat pouring his coffee in a band of sunlight beside the table. This sunlight, so merciful to the violet gown, shone pitilessly on the darkened hollows which the night had left under her eyes, and on the little lines which had gathered around her bravely smiling mouth.
"It was a wonderful success, all the papers say so, Oliver," she said, when he had seated himself at the other end of the table and taken the coffee from her hand, which shook in spite of her effort.
"Yes, it went off well, there's no doubt of it," he answered cheerfully, so cheerfully that for a minute a blind hope shot trembling through her mind. Could it all have been a dream? Was there some dreadful mistake? Would she presently discover that she had imagined that night of useless agony through which she had passed?