'It must have been horribly painful,' said the listener to himself. He began to pity Downing.
Familiarity had bred in Wantley, not contempt, but a certain indulgent pity not far removed from contempt, for what he and Mrs. Robinson, seeing eye to eye in this one matter, regarded as Lady Wantley's peculiar and slightly absurd religious vagaries. Dimly aware of this attitude, of this lack of respect for what were to herself vital truths, Lady Wantley, when in their presence, exercised greater self-control than either of them ever guessed.
But now, for the moment, she was in no condition to restrain herself; and though, as he opened the door of the Picture Room, she looked round for a moment, she still continued talking aloud in apparently eager argument with some unseen presence. 'Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.'
She spoke with increasing excitement, and with what seemed to the hearer a strange exultation.
He stopped short, and, retracing his footsteps, closed the door. It had always been tacitly agreed between himself and his cousin that Penelope's household should hear as little as was possible of Lady Wantley in these, her wilder moods.
Again he went towards her. As he did so, she stood up and advanced to meet him. Her pale face was on a level with his own; her grey eyes were dilated. Something had stirred her far more deeply than she was wont to be stirred by material things. She looked, Wantley thought, inspired, exhilarated, as one might look on emerging triumphantly from some awful ordeal.
As he gazed at her there came to him the hope, the almost incredulous hope, that she—the mother—had prevailed; that her words, even if winged with what seemed madness, had been so eloquent as to convince Downing that what he was about to do was an evil thing, one out of which no good could come to the woman he loved.
'Then you have seen him?' he asked in a low voice, and, as he spoke, he took Lady Wantley's hand in his own.
She made a scarcely perceptible movement of assent. 'Thy right hand, O Lord, has become righteous in power. Thy right hand, O Lord, has dashed in pieces the enemy.'
Her voice faltered, and her tall figure swayed forward.