How lonely the world seemed in this solemn pause between night and morning. Never before had Christabel been out alone at such an hour. She had travelled in the dead of the night, and had seen the vague dim night-world from the window of a railway carriage—but never until now had she walked across these solitary hills after midnight. It seemed as if for the first time in her life she were alone with the stars.
How difficult it was in her present state of mind to realize that those lights, tremulous in the deep blue vault, were worlds, and combinations of worlds—almost all of them immeasurably greater than this earth on which she trod. To her they seemed living watchers of the night—solemn, mysterious beings, looking down at her with all-understanding eyes. She had an awful feeling of their companionship as she looked up at them—a mystic sense that all her thoughts—the worst and best of them—were being read by that galaxy of eyes.
Strangely beautiful did the hills and the sky—the indefinite shapes of the trees against the edge of the horizon, the mysterious expanse of the dark sea—seem to her in the night silence. She had no fear of any human presence, but there was an awful feeling in being, as it were, for the first time in her life alone with the immensities. Those hills and gorges, so familiar in all phases of daylight, from sunrise to after set of sun, assumed Titanic proportions in this depth of night, and were as strange to her as if she had never trodden this path before. What was the wind saying, as it came moaning and sobbing along the deep gorge through which the river ran?—what did the wind say as she crossed the narrow bridge which trembled under her light footfall? Surely there was some human meaning in that long minor wail, which burst suddenly into a wild unearthly shriek, and then died away in a low sobbing tone, as of sorrow and pain that grew dumb from sheer exhaustion, and not because there was any remission of pain or sorrow.
With that unearthly sound still following her, she went up the winding hill-side path, and then slowly descended to the darkness of the churchyard—so sunk and sheltered that it seemed like going down into a vault.
Just then the moon leapt from behind an inky cloud, and, in that ghostly light, Christabel saw the pale grey granite cross which had been erected in memory of Angus Hamleigh. It stood up in the midst of nameless mounds, and humble slate tablets, pale and glittering—an unmistakable sign of the spot where her first lover lay. Once only before to-night had she seen that monument. Absorbed in the pursuit of a Pagan scheme of vengeance she had not dared to come within the precincts of the church, where she had knelt and prayed through all the sinless years of her girlhood. To-night some wild impulse had brought her here—to-night, when that crime which she called retribution was on the point of achievement.
She went with stumbling footsteps through the long grass, across the low mounds, till she came to that beneath which Angus Hamleigh lay. She fell like a lifeless thing at the foot of the cross. Some loving hand had covered the mound of earth with primroses and violets, and there were low clambering roses all round the grave. The scent of sweetbriar was mixed with the smell of earth and grass. Some one had cared for that grave, although she, who so loved the dead, had never tended it.
"Oh, my love! my love!" she sobbed, with her face upon the grass and the primrose leaves, and her arms clasping the granite; "my murdered love—my first, last, only lover—before to-morrow's sun is down your death will be revenged, and my life will be over! I have lived only for that—only for that, Angus, my love, my love!" She kissed the cold wet grass more passionately than she had ever kissed the dead face mouldering underneath it. Only to the dead—to the utterly lost and gone—is given this supreme passion—love sublimated to despair. From the living there is always something kept back—something saved and garnered for an after-gift—some reserve in the mind or the heart of the giver; but to the dead love gives all—with a wild self-abandonment which knows not restraint or measure. The wife who, while this man yet lived, had been so rigorously true to honour and duty, now poured into the deaf dead ears a reckless avowal of love—love that had never faltered, never changed—love that had renounced the lover, and had yet gone on loving to the end.
The wind came moaning out of the valley again with that sharp human cry, as of lamentation for the dead.
"Angus!" murmured Christabel, piteously, "Angus, can you hear me?—do you know? Oh, my God! is there memory or understanding in the world where he has gone, or is it all a dead blank? Help me, my God! I have lost all the old sweet illusions of faith—I have left off praying, hoping, believing—I have only thought of my dead—thought of death and of him till all the living world grew unreal to me—and God and Heaven were only like old half-forgotten dreams. Angus!"
For a long time she lay motionless, her cold hands clasping the cold stone, her lips pressed upon the soft dewy turf, her face buried in primrose leaves—then slowly, and with an effort, she raised herself upon her knees, and knelt with her arms encircling the cross—that sacred emblem which had once meant so much for her: but which, since that long blank interval last winter, seemed to have lost all meaning. One great overwhelming grief had made her a Pagan—thirsting for revenge—vindictive—crafty—stealthy as an American Indian on the trail of his deadly foe—subtle as Greek or Oriental to plan and to achieve a horrible retribution.