“It would never have done,” she said to herself. “It would never have done at all. This is the better way—better, by far.”
But it was hard enough to face, and it was fantastic enough to think that she had really determined to face it. In a minute or so she sat down, with her brush in her hand, and her hair loose upon her shoulders, to confront the facts once more. She was going to spend her winter at Pen’yllan. She had given up the flesh-pots of Egypt. She was going to breakfast at eight, dine at two when there was no company, take five o’clock tea, and spend the evening with the Misses Tregarthyn. She would stroll in the garden, walk on the beach, and take Miss Clarissa’s medicines meekly. At this point a new view of the case presented itself to her, and she began to laugh. Mustard baths, and Dr. Puddifoot’s prescriptions, in incongruous connection with her own personal knowledge of things, appeared all at once so ludicrous, that they got the better of her, and she laughed until she found herself crying; and then, angry as she was at her own weakness, the tears got the better of her, too, for a short time. If she had never been emotional before, she was emotional enough in these days. She could not pride herself upon her immovability now. She felt, constantly, either passionate anger against herself, or passionate contempt, or a passionate eagerness to retrieve her lost self-respect. What could she do? How could she rescue herself? This would not do! This would not do! She must make some new struggle! This sort of thing she was saying feverishly from morning until night.
Secretly she had almost learned to detest Pen’yllan. Pen’yllan, she told herself, had been the cause of all her follies; but it was safer at present than London. If she stayed at Pen’yllan long enough, surely she could wear herself out, or rather wear out her fancies. A less resolute young woman would, in all likelihood, have trifled weakly with her danger; but it was not so with Lisbeth. She had not trifled with it from the first: she had held herself stubbornly aloof from any little self-indulgence; and now she was harder upon herself than ever. She would have died cheerfully, rather than have betrayed herself, and if she could die, surely she could endure a dull winter.
Her moral condition was so far improved, however, that she did not visit her small miseries upon her aunts, as she would have done in the olden days. Her behavior was really creditable, under the circumstances. She played chess with Miss Clarissa in the evening, or read aloud, or sung for them, and began to take a whimsical pleasure in their delight at her condescension. They were so easily delighted, that she felt many a sting of shame at her former delinquencies. She had an almost morbid longing “to be good,” like Georgie, and she practiced this being “good” upon the three spinsters, with a persistence at which she herself both laughed and cried when she was alone. Her first letter to Georgie puzzled the girl indescribably, and yet touched her somehow. She, who believed her beloved Lisbeth to be perfect among women, could not quite understand the psychological crisis through which she was passing, and yet could not fail to feel that something unusual was happening.
“I take Aunt Clarissa’s medicine with a mild regularity which alarms her,” the letter announced. “She thinks I must be going into a consumption, and tearfully consults Dr. Puddifoot in private. The cook is ordered to prepare particularly nourishing soups for dinner, and if my appetite is not something startling, everybody turns pale. And yet all this does not seem to me as good a joke as it would have done years ago. I see another side to it. I wonder how it is that they can be so fond of me. For my part, I am sure I could never have been fond of Lisbeth Crespigny.”
CHAPTER XIX.
AND THAT WAS THE END OF IT.
The roses fell, one by one, in Miss Clarissa’s flower beds, and so at last did the palest autumn-bloom; the leaves dropped from the trees, and the winds from the sea began to blow across the sands, in chilly gusts. But Lisbeth stayed bravely on. Rainy days dragged by wearily enough, and cold ones made their appearance, but she did not give up even when Mrs. Despard wondered, and Georgie implored in weekly epistles. The winter routine of the Tregarthyn household was not exciting, but it was a sort of safeguard. Better dullness than something worse! Perhaps, in time, by spring, it might be different. And yet she could not say that she found her state of mind improving. And as to her body—well, Miss Clarissa might well sigh over her in secret. If she had been pale and thin before, she had not gained flesh and color. She persisted in her long walks in desperation, and came home after them, looking haggard and hollow-eyed. She wandered about the garden, in self-defense, and was no less tired. She followed Dr. Puddifoot’s directions to the letter, and, to the Misses Tregarthyn’s dismay, was not improved. In fact, as that great man, Dr. Puddifoot, observed, “Something was radically wrong.”
It was an unequal, miserable-enough struggle, but it had its termination; and, like all such terminations, it was an abrupt, unexpected, almost fantastic one. Lisbeth had never thought of such an end to her self-inflicted penance. No such possibility had presented itself to her mind. It was not her way to romance, and she had confined herself to realities.
Sitting at her bedroom window, one chill, uncomfortable December day, she arrived at a fanciful caprice. It was as raw and miserable a day as one would, or rather would not, wish to see. The wind blew over the sea in gusts, the gulls flew languidly under the gray sky, a few dead leaves swirled about in eddies in the road, and yet this caprice took possession of Lisbeth, as she looked out, and appreciated the perfection of desolateness. Since Georgie had left Pen’yllan, she had never once been near the old trysting-place. Her walks had always been in the opposite direction, and now it suddenly occurred to her, that she would like to go and see how things would look in her present mood. In five minutes from the time the fancy seized her, Miss Clarissa caught a glimpse of something through the parlor window, which made her utter an exclamation: