The little parlor was still. Mrs. Hammond never kept her maid up to assist in her disrobing, if she intended remaining out until a late hour. Nurse and child were quiet in the adjacent nursery. Closing the door of communication, Sarah stripped her hair and arms of their ornaments; took off her diamond pin, then her rings, and laid them away in her jewelry case; divested herself of her rich dress, and drew from her wardrobe a plain, dark wrapper, which she put on. Next she sat down at her writing-desk, selected a sheet of paper, and wrote a single line—when a thought struck her, and she stopped. A momentary irresolution ended in her tearing off a strip containing what she had penned, and holding it in the flame of the lamp until it was consumed. "Best not! best not!" she muttered. "Doubt may bring comfort to the one or two who will need it. Let them doubt! Save appearances if you can, my poor mother would say." A smile of unutterable scorn glimmered over her face. She pushed away the desk and walked to the window.
From the distant ball-room the throbbing waves of music still rolled past on the summer air, and blent with them was the solemn undertone of the surf. Did men call its mighty voice a monotone? To her it was eloquent of many and awful things—not frightful. What was there of terror in thoughts of rest, endless sleep, rocked for ages by the rising and falling tide, hushed into dreamless repose by the music of the billows? No more of a vain and wearisome life; no more baffled aspirations and crushed affections; no more disheartening attempts to find and reach the right—to follow in the steep, rugged path of duty, and shun the easy, alluring way to which heart and memory were ever pointing; no more of stern rebuke and sneering taunt; no more galled pride and outraged womanhood; no more lying gayety, smiles, and repartee, when the spirit was writhing in impotent agony, longing to shriek out its intensity of woe! Only sleep, rest, peace!
"Sleep! rest peace!" She gasped the words feverishly, as they seemed to come to her on the breeze. Might she not seek these now! now! Not yet! The grounds, the beach were still populous with groups of strollers. She would be seen—perhaps recognized—probably frustrated in her purpose. Leaning her head against the casement, she sat there an hour—not debating, still less wavering in her resolve, only waiting until flight would be safe—and thinking! thinking! thinking! until her brain whirled.
A thwarted, warped, disjointed existence had hers been from its beginning. Denied food suitable for the mental and spiritual need; denied sympathy, air, and expression of suffering; under the slow torture of this starvation, every avenue to goodness and liberty hedged up, and, for the future, temptation, repudiation, loneliness, perhaps a sullied name—who could dispute her right to try release by one brief pang she alone could feel? Who would miss her? Not the world that flattered her wealth and wit, her laces, silks, and diamonds; not the mother and sister who worshipped the gilded Juggernaut "Society;" not he who was that night sleeping soundly on the same sea that would embosom her in her sweeter, deeper slumber. Shocked he might be at an event so unexpected and uncommon. His next sensation would be a relief at his deliverance from a burden, at his freedom to come and go as he liked—no longer banished by her obstinacy and his own. He had loved her as most other men do their wives—a bond too weak to bear a heavy blow at their self-love. She had sinned beyond forgiveness in his eyes.
Of Philip she thought with a mingling of tenderness and resentment. His unthinking gallantry had been the root of her sorest trouble; but it was unthinking, not wilful wrong. Nor was she the only sufferer. His heart was well-nigh as hungry as hers. Within the past week she had seen this more clearly than ever before, and he had felt it! Lucy's narrow mind, her insipidity, her inordinate vanity, her selfish idolatry of pleasures that wearied him; her disrelish for intellectual and domestic enjoyments, displayed in its most objectionable form, in her indifference to his company, and her neglect of her child—these were working out their legitimate result in his alienation from her, and attraction towards the once slighted sister, whose large heart and mental gifts he now valued at their true worth. To repel him, as much as to drown her cares, Sarah had plunged into the vortex she had heretofore avoided. She had heard that there was temporary solace in this species of dissipation. The cup was, for her, sparkless and bitter, from surface to dregs.
She was saving him with herself by this final step! He would realize this truth, in the throe that would shake his soul when he found she was gone; perhaps, even in that anguished hour, would bless her for having showed to him, while she drove him back from, the abyss they were together approaching. It was no idle vaunt she had made to Lewis, that the principles inherited from her father would save her from overt sin. Thus, thus would she flee the temptation, when the heart had left the will to battle unaided.
Her father! the gray old man who was toiling through this summer's heat, in his deserted home, as he had through so many summers gone! he who had never given her an impatient or angry word—whose pride and joy she still was! The stroke would be severe upon him. Yet he would not refuse comfort. There were still left to him his boys—fine, manly fellows; Jeannie and his baby grandchild—his lost daughter's gift. Tears rushed into the hot, wild eyes with this last image, but she would not let them flow.
"Is it not better that I should leave her now, when the parting will give her no pain, when one little week will blot out my memory entirely from her mind, than to wait until she can recollect and miss me?"
The music had ceased. The revellers had dropped away faster than they had collected, when once the movement was made to retire. The murmur of the deep was the only sound abroad; the stars were the only sentinels. Sarah arose, threw a shawl over her head, and cautiously unlocked the door. A strong rush of air blew it from her hold, and as she caught it, to draw it after her, she trod upon some object lying on the floor. Mechanically she stooped to pick it up. It was an infant's shoe, a dainty little gaiter, that peeped, during the day, from beneath Baby Belle's white skirt. To Sarah's touch it seemed that the lining still retained the warmth of the child's foot.
Never, oh, never, was the patter of those baby feet to make glad music for the mother's ear! Others must guide and sustain her trial steps; others smooth her daily path; others direct the inexperience of the girl in the perilous passes where that mother had fallen and perished!