“Cicely, Cis, my Holly, don’t, don’t, for the love of justice, for the love of me, benumb yourself with such idiocy! I have no wife! Cis, listen! I—have—no—wife! Will you leave me?” Rodney cried, leaping to his feet, for Cis had risen. “You can’t! Throw over the Church! Come to me! You love me; I worship you. I need you. Cis, are you utterly heartless? Church or me, and you hesitate! Me, your husband! Oh, Cis, look at this home of ours; stay in it!”
Cis lifted both arms toward heaven with a great, tragic gesture, and turned in silence toward the door. Rodney leaped to reach it before her, but she raised her hand and looked at him. Her blanched face, surmounted by her glowing hair was deathlike and awful; it made Rodney fall back to let her pass, afraid to check her.
“I will go away to think. I can’t think now. I will send you word when I know. I may come back. I cannot think. You have killed my brain. I don’t know—but you have a living wife! I will go away to think. Let me go, alone. I must go—alone. There is not even Cis Adair left to go with me. How strange to come alive and go out dead! Your wife is alive. Good-bye. Let me pass.”
Cis spoke slowly, with great difficulty, yet clearly, and Rodney, awed and conscience-stricken to see her thus, fell back and let her go. Afterward he marvelled that he had done so, and cursed his folly, but under the spell of Cicely’s eyes he could not do otherwise.
CHAPTER XIII
DARKNESS
CICELY came out into the golden weather of that belated St. Martin’s Summer day which she had said had been sent to bless her path to her new home. The sunshine was as warm, the air as soft, the sky as beautifully blue as when she had crossed the threshold of her paradise, from which horror and her stumbling conscience were driving her, but she saw nothing of the beauty around her.
Shut into her own mind, she walked unseeing, unaware, the interior darkness not lifting even so much as to reveal to her what and why she suffered. Or did she suffer? Something had happened to her; everything was obliterated; pain was not conscious to her, nor loss, but in a vacuum that forbade breath, in a pit without ray or exit, she walked the Beaconhite streets, not knowing where she went, nor whom she passed. Something repeated ceaselessly: “A wife. A wife, alive; he has a wife. He is married.” She did not know why she so insisted upon this; it tired her, and many men had a wife. Who was it that had one whose having one so mattered to her?
She could not think; she must think. That was it; she must think. Never before had she felt the need of thinking, but there was something that she must think out. What it was, or why she must think about it, she could not tell, but the immediate, pressing necessity was to think; she must find a place to think in. Not her own room at Mrs. Wallace’s; she would not go there. The park? That might do, though she would like to go where no one could come near her, and the park would be full of strollers on such a Sunday as this. Solitude, a place to think, to gather up vague horrors which were lurking at the back of her brain, waiting to be assembled into definite agony. Cis dimly felt that agony was upon her, beginning, yet almost it would be better than this strange bewilderment which held for her but two cogent impressions. They rose up out of her chaos like spars of a shipwreck: Someone, Rodney Moore—but she could not quite grasp who Rodney Moore was, why his affairs affected her—had a living wife. And she must find solitude and think; there was something that she must clearly see, upon which she must decide.
She turned the corner of a street, going on aimlessly. The church had not occurred to her as a quiet place in which she could think, still less did it occur to poor Cicely, who had few of the habits of devotion, to seek the church for enlightenment, guidance, strength. She had never formed the custom of making visits to the church, so now, bewildered, benumbed, there was no deep-seated instinct to lead her thither when her brain was not directing her steps. Yet before her, as she came down this street into which she had turned, stood the church of St. Francis Xavier, the church to which she repaired nearly every week for her compulsory Mass of Sunday.
“That ought to be a quiet place,” Cis told herself, and ascended the church steps. It was a large church, fine in architecture, not tasteful in decoration. It was much too strong-colored, too bizarre in the designs of its interior, yet it contrived to get an effect of splendor, in spite of its offenses against the canons of art, and it needed no contriving to give an instant sense of cheerfulness, of homelikeness, of kindness, and, withal, of devotion to those who entered it.