She saw that he shook from head to foot, and she knew that she had hurt him mortally. But every force of her passionate nature had become negative to all appeal from him. She could but stand with an impassive face and bid him go, lest he court worldly failure instead of success.
And so they parted like strangers.
When he had passed from her sight, Rachel sank in a little heap on the tomb. She bent her face on her knees. She felt as if a sounding-instrument had gone to the very depths of her heart and explored there among ambiguous weeds and mud, and as she listened to the message that came back, she rocked backward and forward in a very ecstasy of barren grief and shame. It seemed to her that she had reached the burying point of life, and her sobs, quick with the agony of youthful living, sounded small and piteous in that quiet place of the dead.
CHAPTER XII
THE MIGRATORY INSTINCT
During the first weeks succeeding Emil's departure, Rachel looked feverishly for a letter. It seemed to her the intensity of her longing must cause one to appear. But none came, and finally she realized that none would come. She went about with a curled lip and a scornful eye. Nora Gage might run the house as she chose and cook as many savory dishes as she pleased, the girl did not care; she was indifferent even to her grandfather; but let the one or the other cross her will, and her anger blazed forth. These violent outbursts were nature's defence.
In the painful upheaval that separated her dream from the reality, that which was the very centre of her higher life, suffered to such an extent that she must have become inert, had it not been for the responsibility felt by all the ruder faculties of her hardy young being. She had sought love, struggling albeit unconsciously, toward a supposed freedom; and driven back on herself, she would have become like a prisoner at the bottom of a cellar—bleeding, discouraged, without further hope—had it not been for the nerves that proved insurrectionary, for the temper that refused to be thwarted. The activity of these rescuers gradually amazed the girl herself and drew her from the contemplation of her trouble. But the experience, long after the actual pain of it had given place to a general dissatisfaction with existence, left its trace upon her face; and this tempestuous beauty, wrought from within, played around her lips in a smile of tragic comprehension and increased the range of her youthful and expressive eye.
At home Nora dragged her slippers over the kitchen floor with a flapping sound, and at "the barn," where even the occasional customer had ceased to appear, André played wild airs upon his fiddle. Both these sounds were intolerable to Rachel and, to escape them, she fled to the cliffs. There, even as the cold weather came on, she sat for hours, with her chin buried in her hands and her eyes on the ocean—the ocean which, unfathomable and perpetually active, built itself into gigantic walls that broke against the rocks with a reverberating report and were sucked back emitting long murmurs.
Old David, thinking that he discovered in this preoccupation with the sea a likeness to her father, approached Zarah Patch on the subject and from a distance, screwing up their eyes in the sunlight, the two ancient men observed her.
"It's her father's blood," explained old David, "often and often I seen him look the same way."