Lacrima had by this time reached the end of her endurance. With a sudden flash of genuine Italian anger she flung her cousin back, with such unexpected violence, that the elder girl would actually have fallen to the floor, if she had not encountered in her collapse the arm of the wicker chair which stood behind her.
She rose silent and malignant.
“So that’s what we gentle, wily ones do, is it, when we lose our little tempers! All right, my friend, all right! I shall remember.”
She walked haughtily to the door that divided their rooms.
“The sooner I am married,” she cried, as a final hit, “the sooner you will be—and I shall be married soon—soon—soon; perhaps before this summer is out!”
Lacrima stood for some moments rigid and unmoving. Then there came over her an irresistible longing to escape from this house, and flee far off, anywhere, anyhow, so long as she could be alone with her misery, alone with her tragic resolution.
The invasion of Gladys had made this resolution a very different thing from what it had seemed an hour ago. But she must recover herself! She must see things again in the clearer, larger light of sublime sacrifice. She must purge the baseness of her cousin’s sensual magnetism out of her brain and her heart!
She hurriedly fastened on her hat, took her faded parasol, slipped the tiny St. Thomas into her dress, and ran down the great oak staircase. She hurried past the entrance without turning aside to greet the impassive Mrs. Romer, seated as usual in her accustomed place, and skirting the east lawns emerged from the little postern-gate into the park. Crossing a half-cut hay-field and responding gravely and gently to the friendly greetings of the hay-makers, she entered the Yeoborough road just below the steep ascent, between high overshadowing hedges, of Dead Man’s Lane.
Whether from her first exit from the house, she had intended to follow this path, she could hardly herself have told. It was the instinct of a woman at bay, seeking out, not the strong that could help her, but the weak that she herself could help. It was also perhaps the true Pariah impulse, which drives these victims of the powerful and the well-constituted, to find rehabilitation in the society of one another.
As she ascended the shadowy lane with its crumbling banks of sandy soil and its overhanging trees, she felt once again how persistently this heavy luxuriant landscape dragged her earthwards and clogged the wings of her spirit. The tall grasses growing thick by the way-side enlaced themselves with the elder-bushes and dog-wood, which in their turn blended indissolubly with the lower branches of the elms. The lane itself was but a deep shadowy path dividing a flowing sea of foliage, which seemed to pour, in a tidal wave of suffocating fertility, over the whole valley.