The long afternoon was still only half over, when—comforted and at peace with herself, as a devoted patriot might be at peace, when the throw of the dice has appointed him as his country’s liberator—she rose from her recumbent position, and sitting on the edge of her bed turned over the pages of her tiny edition of St. Thomas à Kempis.
It had been long since she had opened this volume. Indeed, isolated from contact with any Catholic influence except that of the philosophical Mr. Taxater, Lacrima had been recently drifting rather far away from the church of her fathers. This complete upheaval of her whole life threw her back upon her old faith.
Like so many other women of suppressed romantic emotions, when the moment came for some heroic sacrifice for the sake of her friend, she at once threw into the troubled waters the consecrated oil that had anointed the half-forgotten piety of her childhood.
One curious and interesting psychological fact in connection with this new trend of feeling in her, was the fact that the actual realistic horror of being, in a literal and material sense, at the mercy of Mr. John Goring never presented itself to her mind at all. Its very dreadfulness, being a thing that amounted to sheer death, blurred and softened its tangible and palpable image.
Yet it must not be supposed that she meditated definitely upon any special line of action. She formulated no plan of self-destruction. For some strange reason, it was much less the bodily terror of the idea that rose up awful and threatening before her, than its spiritual and moral counterpart.
Had Lacrima been compelled, like poor Sonia in the Russian novel, to become a harlot for the sake of those she loved, it would have been the mental rather than the physical outrage that would have weighed upon her.
She was of that curious human type which separates the body from the soul, in all these things. She had always approached life rather through her mind than through her senses, and it was in the imagination that she found both her catastrophes and recoveries. In this particular case, the obsessing image of death had for the moment quite obliterated the more purely realistic aspect of what she was contemplating. Her feeling may perhaps be best described by saying that whenever she imaged the farmer’s possession of her, it was always as if what he possessed was no more than a dead inert corpse, about whose fate none, least of all herself, could have any further care.
She had just counted the strokes of the church clock striking four, when she heard Gladys’ steps in the adjoining room. She hurriedly concealed the little purple-covered volume, and lay back once more upon her pillows. She fervently prayed in her heart that Gladys might be ignorant of what had occurred, but her knowledge of the relations between father and daughter made this a very forlorn hope.
Such as it was, it was entirely dispelled as soon as the fair-haired creature glided in and sat down at the foot of her bed.
Gladys looked at her cousin with intent and luxurious interest; her expression being very much what one might suppose the countenance of a young pagan priestess to have worn, as she gazed, dreamily and sweetly, in a pause of the sacrificial procession, at some doomed heifer “lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garlands dressed.”