Dividing Waters

by I. A. R. Wylie

The Rev. John uttered a smothered cry, and without a word to his guest hurried from the room. Miles followed him. But Nora remained quietly by the window and took no notice of the squire as, with an awkwardly expressed hope that "it would be all right," he left her to herself.

She knew what had happened. Her mother had bidden her good night, and night had come. She was alone—in the whole world alone and friendless.

CHAPTER II

EXILED

There is only one sorrow in life which is really great, and that is the loss of those we love. The other sorrows seem great so long as we have been spared the hardest blow which life can deal us, and then we understand that, after all, they were very petty and that if we had chosen we could have borne them patiently, even cheerfully. Loss of health, loss of wealth, loss of position—they are all bad in their way, and as a rule we make the worst we can of them; but not till we have to bear them alone, without the support of some familiar, loving hand, have we the right to cry out that we can endure no more.

And for the first time in her life Nora knew loneliness—not the loneliness which she had felt in her husband's home and amongst her husband's people, for that had been temporary, a state which could, if necessary, be overcome by a return to those whom she had left of her own free-will and whose love and sympathy she could still claim. This loneliness was final, unbridgeable. Death had raised up a wall between her and all return. The one being whose hand could have comforted her, in whose arms she could have found peace and rest, had passed beyond recall, and it was in vain that, in a childish agony of grief, she flung herself down by her mother's sofa and pleaded with the dead not to leave her comfortless. There was no answer. The patient, noble woman who had lain there day after day without complaint, watching the slow, painful fulfilment of her destiny, had gone and would come no more. She had gained her freedom. Even in her own stormy sorrow Nora realised so much—that her mother was free and that her life had been a long, bitter imprisonment, to which it would have been cruel to recall her. She had gone willingly, passing out of a sphere in which she had always been an exile, and taking with her the last—perhaps the only link which had ever bound Nora to her home. In those hours when Nora had hated the stuffy little flat and had longed for the scent of the home flowers, it had always been of her mother's garden which she had thought; when she had seen the picture of the Vicarage rise before her eyes it had always been her mother's room which had stood out clearest, which had tempted her by the tenderest recollections. And now that her mother had gone, that home had ceased to be her home. The flowers were dead in the garden, the rooms empty of the old haunting charm, the glamour which her exile's memory had cast about her old life became dull and faded. She saw now an ugly red-brick building, with dreary, silent rooms, and people with whom she had never been in sympathy save in her imagination. This last was the bitterest disappointment of all. In her anger against Wolff she had expected and believed so much of these "home people," and they had, after all, failed her.

As she sat alone in the sad, empty room, she felt that those five days in England had taken from her not only the dearest hope but the last illusion. Her mother had said, "You do not belong here," and it was true. She was an exile in this narrow little world, and between her father and herself there was an insurmountable barrier of taste and thought. It had always been there, just as, like her mother, she had always been an exile, but in her girlhood's days it had been less pronounced, less clearly defined. Now that she had had experience in another world, she could no longer bear the trammels of her father's conventional prejudices. She had hated and despised her mode of life at Wolff's side; she began to see, though dimly, that it had had at least its great moments, that it was at least inspired by a great idea worthy of the sacrifices it demanded. Here there was no sacrifice and no idea—only vegetation, and her companion was not even a useful machine. He was a weak muddler, and his world was a little village which muddled along in a muddle-loving country and believed great things of itself and its institutions. Just as Nora had found the squire ridiculous with his two-week soldiers, so her father irritated her with his mingled piety, pusillanimity, and timid self-satisfaction. Not even their common grief had brought them together. They had stood wordless by their dead, and when the Rev. John had seemed about to speak, she had fled from him, dreading that his words might destroy the impression which the serene sleeper had made upon her mind. Since then they had hardly spoken, and Miles had wandered between them like a sullen, dissatisfied ghost. Somehow, he felt that his influence over Nora was at an end, that from the moment her feet had touched her native soil she had turned from him and his explanations with something like repugnance. He did not trouble to seek the reason—indeed, she could have given him none; but the shadow between them threw Nora back into even deeper loneliness.

And the wonder which had come into her life—the miracle which had been revealed to her in her mother's eyes? She only knew that its revelation had come too late. Though all that was best and noblest in her stirred as if beneath some divine touch, she felt none of the exultation, none of the sanctified happiness which might have been hers. The gift which was to come to her was like a golden link in a broken chain, like a jewel without setting—beautiful but imperfect. She was indeed an exile and bore the exile's curse.

Thus, when the first tempest of grief had passed she faced the future with the first fear turned to conviction. She had lost everything, even to her nationality. Those few months had been sufficient to imbue her, without her knowledge, with ideas and principles which made her a stranger in her own land. She could no longer admire without reservation; at every turn she was forced to compare and criticise with the same sharpness as she had compared and criticised in her German home, and a word against the people to whom she still theoretically belonged was sufficient to arouse the same indignation and resentment. Poor Nora! It was a bitter self-revelation which she had to face, and the only being who could have helped her in this conflict between the dual affections had been laid only a few hours before in the dreary churchyard whose walls she could distinguish through the leafless trees. The sight of those walls and the red spire of the church awakened her grief to its first intensity. She sprang up from her place by the empty sofa and hurried out of the room and out of the house. On her way she passed her father's room. The door stood open, and she saw him seated by the table, with his face buried in his hands. She knew that he was crying, but she shrank swiftly away, with the horrible conviction that she despised him. She wondered if Wolff had cried when he had returned and found that she had left him. She felt sure that he had gone on working, and the picture which rose before her fancy of a strong, broad-shouldered man bent over his maps and plans in unswervable devotion caused her a strange sensation of relief.

It was already late afternoon as she left the village behind her. She had no definite goal save the one to be alone, and beyond the range of prying, curious eyes, and almost unconsciously she chose the path over the fields where, months before, she had gone to meet Robert Arnold. Then it had been late summer, and it was now winter, but so vividly did the scene recur to her that when a tall, well-known figure strode out of the mists towards her, she could have believed that all the preceding months, with their condensed history of bewildering change, had been no more than an hallucination and that she was once more Nora Ingestre, setting out to learn the mysteries of her own heart. But the next instant her hand was taken, and she was looking into a familiar face which was yet so altered that she would have known alone from its lines of care and grief that time had moved on, bringing with him his inevitable burden.