Then, with a shiver that passed from head to foot, she slowly sank back on her pillows and closed her eyes.
Gladys rose a little uneasily from her chair. “But of course,” she said, “you understand she may not want to go away. She is quite crazy, you know. And she may prefer wandering about freely among dark woods to being locked up in a nice white-washed asylum, under the care of fat motherly nurses!”
With this parting shot she went off into her own room feeling in a curious vague manner that somehow or another the edge of her delectation had been taken off. In this unexpected resolution of the Italian, the Mythology of Sacrifice had suddenly struck a staggering blow at the Mythology of Power. Like the point of a bright silver sword, this unforseen vein of heroism in the Pariah cleared the sultry air of that hot night with a magical freshness and coolness. A planetary onlooker might have been conscious at that moment of strange spiritual vibrations passing to and fro over the sleeping roofs of Nevilton. But perhaps such a one would also have been conscious of the abysmal indifference to either stream of opposing influence, of the high, cold galaxy of the Milky Way, stretched contemptuously above them all!
All we are able to be certain of is, that as the fair-haired daughter of the house prepared for bed she muttered sullenly to herself. “I’ll make her go anyway. It will be lovely to feel her shiver, when we pass under those thick laurels! That mad girl won’t leave the place, unless they drag her by force.”
Left alone, Lacrima remained, for nearly two hours, motionless and with closed eyes. She was not asleep, however. Strange and desperate thoughts pursued one another through her brain. She wondered if she, too, like the girl of Auber Lake, were destined to find relief from this merciless world in the unhinging of her reason. She reverted again and again in her mind to her cousin’s final malicious suggestion. That would be indeed, she thought, a bitter example of life’s irony, if after going through all this to save the poor wretch, such sacrifice only meant worse misery for her. But no! God could not be as unkind as that.
She stretched out her arm for a book with which to still the troublesome palpitation of her heart.
The book she seized by chance turned out to be Andersen’s Fairy Stories, and she read herself to sleep with the tale of the little princess who wove coats of nettles for her enchanted brothers, and all night long she dreamed of mad unhappy girls struggling amid entwining branches, of bottomless lakes full of terrible drowned faces, and of flocks of wild-geese that were all of them kings’ sons!
The Saturday following this eventful colloquy between the cousins was a day of concentrated gloom. There was thunder in the vicinity and, although no rain had actually fallen in Nevilton, there was a brooding presence of it in the heavy atmosphere.
The night seemed to descend that evening more quickly than usual. By eight o’clock a strange unnatural twilight spread itself over the landscape. The trees in the park submitted forlornly to a burden of sultry indistinction and seemed, in their pregnant stillness, to be trying in vain to make mysterious signals to one another.