Jocelyn gave a prolonged puff, and flipped the cigarette out of its holder.
“There!” she said. “Run, or the beasts will eat you, you are so good to them.”
Mrs. Travis, with a hasty kiss, retreated rapidly, closing the door. Jocelyn laughed, then she moved restlessly up and down the room. Presently she came back to the window, and leaned far out into the darkness. It was late; the town slept, vaguely stretched below in a rambling confusion of dark shapes and corners, foliage, and dimly burning lights. It was very still....
In the girl’s heart joy and pain were strangely blended.
The first of June! This was the seventh of May, nearly a month, that was all! What did it mean? Whither was she being carried? If it could only be always as it had been that evening! She had been so happy. In less than a month she would go away! It seemed very strange, very unreal; there was a desperate discomfort in the thought, the discomfort of unfulfilment.
The vague, dreaming sweetness was being rudely rent away from her thoughts—the glamour that hung like a veil over the past day. For a moment she saw plainly all the naked, unsparing reality. She heard again the words of the sick woman, “Have a good time, you are young, you are beautiful—it is fitting.” The devilish, unconscious irony of them! She felt a great sense of injustice, of hard usage at the hands of fate.
That day a wonderful sweetness had come to her. It was as if, for the first time, life had whispered some secret of hidden meaning, had spoken words at which the longing and the lonely restlessness of her soul had yielded. This was love! Love!
She laughed. The mockery and hopelessness of it were so plain that she felt its strength the more. Her eyes moved restlessly from side to side as if seeking a way of escape—she twisted her hands silently, and pressed them to her cheek. She loved him, and he was beyond her reach—why? why? She chafed under the thought.
The passionate, penetrating cry of a peacock broke suddenly through the vibrating air; it echoed painfully within her. Why should she not know love? What had she done? She had not sought—could she help it? Why put it away? It was sweet and good to be with him, she wanted nothing more. Then there flashed before her the look in Giles’s eyes, as he gazed at her after his struggle with the dog; for one most disquieting moment she saw into them, behind them; he knew there was something further, beyond, something fundamental, burning, unknown to her, which passed by, scorching her like a fiery breath. And for that moment she shrank back frightened ashamed, and thrust the shutters to, to drive out the long, fiercely wailing regret in the shrill, bird’s cry.
The figure of the Polish woman, lying in its white drapery, came before her. A woman with haunting, unhappy eyes, ill—her friend, his wife—her friend! She made a little impatient movement in the dark room, and groping, turned to her bed with a shrinking desire to hide herself. She felt as if in the presence of something contaminating and poisonous; she shuddered, her pride revolted. She drew aside the curtains, and flung herself upon the bed. What had she done? Why should she be treated like this? Tears of impotent rage and self-pity filled her eyes. It was all so new, so strange, so unreal. She drew the clothes over her, as a child does to drive away the fear of bogies. She would not think of these things; there seemed a safety and a refuge in the soft pillows and the familiar cool rustle of the sheets as she turned from side to side. She lay a long time rigid, trying not to think, vaguely uneasy, vaguely unhappy, vaguely frightened; she was very tired too. But in spite of herself all the mingled feelings of the past weeks came back to her. The rude shock, so long ago now, of awakening to the knowledge that he loved her—the horror of it; that horror, which was but sharpened by the something in her own heart which she would not confess. All the weary struggle and repression for days and days with no certain knowledge of what she desired. And this was the end! He could never be hers—and she loved him! She buried her face in the pillows, and sobbed as if her heart would break.