No, I could never have believed it! One short month ago, if all the prophets and wise women and holy monks in Palestine had come in a body and told me this thing, I should have laughed them to scorn,—I should have thought the dead would rise first.
Ah! this is not our Sybil who has played this part. The Sybil whom I loved, next to Guy himself, has vanished into nothingness, and in her stead has come a creature that wears her face, and speaks with her voice,—cold, calculating, false!
It was again Lady Judith who told me. I thought I was prepared for this. But I found that I was not. By the crushing pain which struck me, I knew that I had not really believed it would be thus,—that I had clung, like a drowning man, to the rope which failed me in this extremity—that I had honestly thought that the God to whom I had cried all night long would have come and saved me.
That Sybil should fail was bitterness enough. But what was I to do when Christ failed me? Either He could not hear at all, or He would not hear me. And I did not see that it was of much consequence which it was, since, so far as I was concerned, both came to the same thing.
The comfort Lady Judith tried to offer me sounded like cruel mockery. Even the soft pressure of her hand upon my head rasped my heart like a file.
"Poor, dear child!" she said. "It is so hard to walk in the dark. If the Lord have marked thee for His own—as by the strivings of His Spirit with thee, I trust He has—how sorry He must be for thee, just now!"
Sorry! Then why did He do it? When I am sorry for one I love, I do not give him bitter pain. I felt as if I should sink and die, if I did not get relief by pouring out my heart. I broke from Lady Judith,—she tried in vain to stop me—and I dashed into Lady Sybil's chamber. Queen or villein, it was all one to me then. I was far past any considerations of that sort. If she had ordered me to be instantly beheaded, I should not have thought it signified a straw.
I found her seated on the settle in the window. Oh, how white and worn and weary she looked! Dark rings were round her eyes, worn by pain and weeping and watching through that dreadful night. But I heeded not the signs of her woe. She deserved them. Guy's wrong burned in my heart, and consumed every thing but itself.
She rose hastily when she saw me, and a faint flush came to her white cheek.
"Ah,—Helena!"