And then she sought to brace herself with the thought that she had not greatly suffered.
“It can’t have gone very deep,” she told herself very resolutely, “in so short a time.”
But yet she knew—as we all know—that it is not by time or any other circumstance that Love the Immeasurable can be measured, and that no power on earth can ever obliterate the memory of Love.
Of Montague personally she thought but little during those days. Of Arthur Dermot she thought ceaselessly. Against her will the individuality of the man imposed itself upon her. Night and day she thought of him, puzzled, distressed, humiliated, seeking vainly for a solution to the mystery in which all his actions were wrapped. Why had he misjudged her thus? What madness had driven him to attempt the other man’s life? Was he actually mad, she asked herself? It might have accounted for much, and yet somehow she did not believe it. The man’s melancholy philosophy was the philosophy of reason, his cynical acceptance of life the deliberate and trained conclusion of a balanced mind. His love for herself she found harder to understand, but it moved her to the depths, appealing to her as nothing had ever appealed before. His violence, his brutality, had shocked her unspeakably, so that she prayed passionately that she might never see him again. But yet, strangely, the appeal still held. By that alone, he had entered the inner shrine of her heart, and, strive as she might, she could not cast him out. His love for her might be dead. Never for a moment did she imagine that it could have survived that awful night. But the memory of it—ah, the memory of it—it would go with her all through her life, just as she would remember the purple flower upon the coping in the Palace garden, a thing of beauty beloved for a while and then lost—the gift that the gods had offered only to snatch away ere she had grasped it.
Those days of waiting were as the days spent by a prisoner awaiting trial, only there was no hope on the horizon. Like one of the prisoners of old of whom Arthur had told her, she was tethered to her stone and the first effort she made for freedom would crush her. Though to a great extent she had regained her strength, she knew that she was not equal to hard work—such work as she had done for the Bishop. There were times of faintness and inertia when she felt that the very heart within her must be worn out, times of overwhelming depression also, when for hours the tears would well up and fall and she lacked the power to restrain them.
No one knew what she was enduring. There was no one at hand to help her. Chained to her stone, she waited day by day, not for deliverance but for the coming of her fate.
And then one day there came a letter from Rotherby, and in that letter was an enclosure that sent the blood tingling through her veins. He had sold her sketch for five guineas, and he could dispose of more if she cared to send them. “Couldn’t you do a companion picture to the stepping-stones?” he said in conclusion.
His letter held no endearments. It was the most business-like epistle she had ever received from him, and her gratitude was intense. She sent him all the sketches she had by the next post, and with them a note expressing her earnest thanks and asking how he fared.
Then she sat down to think. It seemed to her in the first flush of excitement that this was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. It was like a tonic to her drooping spirits. Surely it was the turning-point at last!
The bleatings and patterings of a flock of sheep passing up the street brought to her mind the fact that it was market-day. She went to the window with an eagerness she had not known for long with the thought that Oliver might be coming at any time with her sketching materials. She longed to take up her beloved pastime again. If indeed it were to give her back her cherished independence, with what gladness would she spend her utmost effort to achieve her best. But it seemed too good to be true.