CHAPTER XXXVI.
AN AWAKENING.
When Hermia awoke there was a rattle of wagons in the street, and the dawn struggled through the curtains. There was a chill in the air and she shivered a little. She lay recalling the events of the night. Suddenly she sat upright and cast about her a furtive glance of horror. Then she sat still and her teeth chattered.
Cryder’s face looked at her from behind every palm! It grinned mockingly down from every tree! It sprang from the cushions and pressed itself close to her cheek! The room was peopled with Cryder!
She sprang to her feet and threw her arms above her head. “O God!” she cried; “it was but for a night! for a night!”
She fled down the room, Cryder, in augmenting swarm, pursuing her. She flew up the stairs and into her room, and there flung herself on the floor in such mortal agony as she could never know again, because the senses must be blunted ever after. Last night, in Quintard’s arms, as heaven’s lightning flashed through her heart, every avenue in it had been rent wide. The great mystery of life had poured through, flooding them with light, throwing into cloudless relief the glorious heights and the muttering depths. Last night she had dwelt on the heights, and in that starry ether had given no glance to the yawning pits below. But sleep had come; she had slid gently, unwittingly down; she had awakened to find herself writhing on the sharp, jutting rocks of a rayless cavern, on whose roof of sunset gold she had rambled for days and weeks with a security which had in it the blindness of infatuation.
She marry Quintard and live with him as the woman he loved and honored above all women! She try to scale those heights where was to be garnered something better worth offering her lover than any stores in her own sterile soul! That hideous, ineffaceable brand seemed scorching her breast with letters of fire. If she had but half loved Cryder—but she had not loved him for a moment. With her right hand she had cast the veil over her eyes; with her left, she had fought away all promptings that would have rent the veil in twain. Every moment, from beginning to awakening, she had shut her ears to the voice which would have whispered that her love was a deliberate delusion, created and developed by her will. No! she had no excuse. She was a woman of brains; there was no truth she might not have grasped had she chosen to turn her eyes and face it.
She flung her arms over her head, grasping the fringes of the rug, and twisting them into a shapeless mass. She moaned aloud in quick, short, unconscious throbs of sound. She was five-and-twenty, and life was over. She had wandered through long years in a wilderness as desolate as night, and she had reached the gates of the city to find them shut. They had opened for a moment and she had stood within them; then a hand had flung her backward, and the great, golden portals had rushed together with an impetus which welded them for all time. She made no excuses for herself; she hurled no anathemas against fate. Her intellect had been given to her to save her from the mistakes of foolish humanity, a lamp to keep her out of the mud. She had shaded the lamp and gone down into the mire. She had known by experience and by thought that no act of man’s life passed without a scar; that the scars knit together and formed the separate, indestructible constituent fibers of his character. And each fiber influenced eternally the structure as a whole. She had known this, and yet, without a glance into the future, without a stray thought tossed to issues, she had burnt herself as indifferently as a woman who has nothing to lose. It was true that great atonement was in her power, that in a life’s reach of love and duty the scar would fade. But that was not in the question. With such tragic natures there is no medium. She could not see a year in the future that would not be haunted with memories and regrets; an hour when that scar would not burn.
If life could not be perfect, she would have nothing less. She had dealt her cards, she would accept the result. She had had it in her to enjoy a happiness possible only to women of her intellect and temperament. She had deliberately put happiness out of her life, and there could be but one end to the matter.