CHAPTER XXIV.
It seemed to her that there was something marvellously appropriate in the punishment which was to be his, and she would not stretch out a hand to avert it. He who had made her to suffer for her constancy to him was about to suffer for his cruelty to her. Her love had brought suffering to her, and it was surely the justice of Heaven which had decreed that his new love was to mean suffering to himself.
She could not feel the least pity for him; on the contrary, she felt ready to exult over him—to laugh in his face when the blow had fallen upon him. She felt that she should like to see him crushed to the earth—overwhelmed when he fancied that his hour of triumph had come. Only this night did the desire to see him punished take possession of her. She wondered how it was that she had been so patient in the face of the wrong which he had done to her. When she had flung down and trampled on the ivory miniature of him which had stood on her table, she had wept over the fragments, and the next day she had been filled with remorse. She had seen him many times since that day, but no reproach had passed her lips, for no reproach had been in her heart. She had merely thought of him as having ceased to love her whom he had promised to love. But now when she stood alone in her room, knowing that he had not merely forsaken her but had come to love another woman, her hands clenched and her heart burned with the desire of revenge.
A few hours before, she had been shocked by his desire to be revenged upon the wretch who had killed his brother; but she did not think of this as she paced her room in the sway of that sudden passion which had come to her. She felt exultant in the thought of his coming humiliation. It was the justice of Heaven overtaking him. She would laugh in his face when the blow fell upon him.
An hour had transformed her. She had flung her patience and her forbearance to the winds. She hated herself for the folly of her fidelity all those years; but she did not think of Clare with any feeling of jealousy. On the contrary, she felt that the girl was an ally. Without Clare the man would escape all punishment; but with her as an ally he would be crushed.
She was too excited to sleep when at last she got into bed. The rush of this new, strange passion carried her along, and she experienced that positive pleasure of yielding to it, which a release from all trammels of civilisation brings for a time to most people of a healthy nature. She had in a moment been released from the strain which she had put upon herself for so tong. She felt that she was a woman at last—a woman carried along by the most natural of woman's impulses: a passion for revenge. After all, such constancy as had been hers was an agony and not a pleasure. Claude Westwood had spoken the truth: it should be taken for granted that after the lapse of a certain time the validity of a promise made in love ceased.
She told him so much the next day, when he called at The Knoll to see Clare. The girl had gone to Brackenhurst to try to obtain some materials in which she had found her store deficient—a special sort of tracing paper, the need for which Claude had told her of or the previous evening.
Agnes noticed how his face clouded when he learned that Clare was not in the house. She wondered how it was that she had never before seen signs of his new attachment. A few minutes had been sufficient to make Sir Percival acquainted with the truth. And yet it was generally assumed that in such matters women were much more sensitive than men. Could it be that the womanliness in her nature had been blunted by her unnatural constancy?