CHAPTER XIII.
Three days after Lanty’s interview with Hemans, Mabella paid a visit to Vashti.
Sally, grown in stature if not in grace, promptly carried off Dorothy, and the two cousins sat down opposite each other in the dainty room which served as a sitting-room and drawing-room in the Dole parsonage.
There was a great contrast between the two women; despite the beauty and hauteur of Vashti’s face there was a shadow of ineffable sadness upon it. Life was none too sweet upon her lips.
The seed sown in barren Mullein meadow had brought forth a harvest of bitter herbs—wormwood and rue, smartweed and nettles.
Shadowing her eyes was the vague, ever-present unrest of those who do battle with spectres of the mind; there is no expression more pitiful, because it speaks of unending warfare. But upon her brow there shone the majesty of an unconquered will; she had not been bent beneath the knee of man’s authority, nor ground into the mire by poverty’s iron heel, nor bowed beneath the burden of physical pain.
She was in some strange way suggestive of the absolute entity of the individual.
Human ties and relationships seemed, when considered in connection with her, no more than the fragments of the wild vine, which, having striven to bind down the branches of the oak, has been torn from its roots by the merciless vigour of the branch to which it clung, and left to wither without sustenance.
Now and then against the background of The Times there stands forth one figure sublimely alone, superimposed upon the fabric of his generation in splendid isolation—a triumphant, individualized ego.
It is almost impossible to study and comprehend these individuals in their relations to others, the sweep of impulse and energy, the imperious flood of passion, the tumultuous tide of his which animates their being and stimulates their actions is so different from the sluggish, well-regulated stream whose current controls their contemporaries.