CHAPTER V.
THE SWEETS OF SOLITUDE.
A few weeks later Frank made an announcement which gave Hermia a genuine thrill of delight. A fellow bank-clerk was obliged to spend some months in California, and had offered Mordaunt his house in Jersey for the summer. Hermia would not consent to go with them, in spite of their entreaties. As far back as she could remember, way down through the long perspective of her childhood, she had never been quite alone except at night, nor could she remember the time when she had not longed for solitude. And now! To be alone for four months! No more evenings of domestic bliss, no more piles of stockings to darn, no more dinners to concoct, no more discussions upon economy, no more daily tasks carefully planned by Bessie’s methodical mind, no more lessons to teach, no more anything which had been her daily portion for the last thirteen years. Bridget would go with the family. She would do her own cooking, and not eat at all if she did not wish. Her clothes could fall into rags, and her hands look through every finger of her gloves. She would read and dream and forget that the material world existed.
It was a beautiful spring morning when Hermia found herself alone. She had gone with the family to Jersey, and had remained until they were settled. Now the world was her own. When she returned to the flat, she threw her things on the floor, pushed the parlor furniture awry, turned the framed photographs to the wall, and hid the worsted tidies under the sofa.
For two months she was well content. She reveled in her loneliness, in the voiceless rooms, the deserted table, the aimless hours, the forgotten past, the will-painted present. She regarded the post-man as her natural enemy, and gave him orders not to ring her bell. Once a week she took her letters from the box and devoted a half-hour to correspondence. She had a hammock swung in one of the rooms, and dreamed half the night through that she was in the hanging gardens of Semiramis. The darkness alone was between her and the heavens thick with starry gods; and below was the heavy perfume of oranges and lotus flowers. There was music—soft—crashing—wooing her to a scene of bewildering light and mad carousal. There was rapture of power and ecstasy of love. She had but to fling aside the curtains—to fly down the corridor—
It is not to be supposed that Hermia’s imagination was faithful to the Orient. Her nature had great sensuous breadth and wells of passion which penetrated far down into the deep, hard substratum of New England rock; but her dreams were apt to be inspired by what she had read last. She loved the barbarous, sensuous, Oriental past, but she equally loved the lore which told of the rugged strength and brutal sincerity of mediæval days, when man turned his thoughts to love and war and naught besides; when the strongest won the woman he wanted by murder and force, and the woman loved him the better for doing it. Hermia would have gloried in the breathless uncertainty of those days, when death and love went hand-in-hand, and every kiss was bought with the swing of a battle-axe. She would have liked to be locked in her tower by her feudal father, and to have thrown down a rope-ladder to her lover at night. Other periods of history at times demanded her, and she had a great many famous lovers: Bolingbroke and Mirabeau, Napoleon and Aaron Burr, Skobeleff and Cavour, a motley throng who bore a strong racial resemblance to one another when roasting in the furnace of her super-heated imagination.
Again, there were times when love played but a small part in her visions. She was one of the queens of that world to which she had been born, a world whose mountains were of cold brown stone, and in whose few and narrow currents drifted stately maidens in stiff, white collars and tailor-made gowns. She should be one of that select band. It was her birthright; and each instinct of power and fastidiousness, caste and exclusiveness, flourished as greenly within her as if those currents had swept their roots during every year of her life’s twenty-four. When ambition sank down, gasping for breath, love would come forward eager and warm, a halo enveloped the brown-stone front, and through the plate-glass and silken curtains shone the sun of paradise.
For a few weeks the charm of solitude retained its edge. Then, gradually, the restlessness of Hermia’s nature awoke after its sleep and clamored for recognition. She grew to hate the monotony of her own society as she had that of her little circle. She came to dread the silence of the house; it seemed to close down upon her, oppressing, stifling, until she would put her hand to her throat and gasp for breath. Sometimes she would scream at every noise; her nerves became so unstrung that sleep was a visitor who rarely remembered her. Once, thinking she needed change of scene, she went to Jersey. She returned the next morning. The interruption of the habit of years, the absolute change of the past few months made it impossible to take up again the strings of her old life. They had snapped forever, and the tension had been too tight to permit a knot. She could go down to the river, but not back to the existence of the past thirteen years.
For a week after her return from Jersey she felt as if she were going mad. Life seemed to have stopped; the future was a blank sheet. Try to write on it as she would, the characters took neither form nor color. To go and live alone would mean no more than the change from her sister’s flat to a bare-walled room; to remain in her present conditions was unthinkable. She had neither the money nor the beauty to accumulate interests in life. Books ceased to interest her, imagination failed her. She tried to write, but passion was dead, and the blood throbbed in her head and drowned words and ideas. She had come to the edge of life, and at her feet swept the river—in its depths were peace and oblivion—eternal rest—a long, cool night—the things which crawl in the deep would suck the blood from her head—a claw with muscles of steel would wrench the brain from her skull and carry it far, far, where she could feel it throb and jump and ache no more—
And then, one day, John Suydam died and left her a million dollars.