"Can any one help me, I wonder?"
I sat down on a chair near her and said—
"Do you think it would help you to talk of what has frightened you?"
"I don't think I can. I would tell you, Mr. Lyndsay, if I could tell any one; for you know what it is to be weak and suffering; you are as sympathetic as a woman, and more merciful than some women. But part of the horror of it all is that I cannot explain it. Words seem to be no good, just because I have used them so easily and so meaninglessly all my life—just as words and nothing more."
"Can you tell me what you saw?"
"A face, only a face, when I woke up suddenly. It looked as if it were painted on the darkness. But oh, the dreadfulness of it and what it brought with it! Do you remember the line, 'Bring with you airs from heaven or blasts from hell'? Yes, it was in hell, because hell is not a great gulf, like Dante described, as I used to think; it is no place at all—it is something we make ourselves. I felt all this as I saw the face, for we ourselves are not what we think. Part of what I used to play with was true enough; it is all Mâyâ, a delusion, this sense—life—it is no life at all. The actual life is behind, under it all; it goes deep deep down, it stretches on, on—and yet it has nothing to do with space or time. I feel as if I were beating myself against a stone wall. My words can have no sense for you any more than they would have had for me yesterday."
"But tell me, why should this discovery of this other life make you so miserable?"
"Oh, because it brings such a want with it. How can I explain? It is like a poor wretch stupefied with drink. Don't you know the poor creatures in the Eastend sometimes drink just that they may not feel how hungry and how cold they are? 'They remember their misery no more.' Is the life of the world and of outward things like that, if we live too much in it? I used to be so contented with it all—its pleasures, its little triumphs, even its gossip; and what I called my aspirations I satisfied with what was nothing more than phrases. And now I have found my real self, now I am awake, I want much more, and there is nothing—only a great silence, a great loneliness like that in the face. And the theories I talked about are no comfort any more; they are just what pretty speeches would be to a person in torture. Oh, Mr. Lyndsay, I always feel that you are real, that you are good; tell me what you know. Is there nothing but this dark void beyond when life falls away from us?"
She lifted towards me a face quivering with excitement, and eyes that waited wild and famished for my answer—the answer I had not for her, and then indeed I tasted the full bitterness of the cup of unbelief.
"No," she said presently, "I knew it; no one can do me any good but Cecilia de Noël."