CHAPTER II
THE SHADOW IS LIFTED
I
When a woman has drifted into an engagement imposed upon her by years of friendship, it is rare that she has the courage to break the bonds, however irksome she may find them.
Gabrielle knew that she was drifting into this marriage with Harry Lassett, and yet her will was paralysed. The baser appeal had passed as a menacing wave upon a strange sea, and all that was left was the troubled waters of the seemingly inevitable. Her love-making had been so many hours of a dead passion, which no pretence could reanimate. She had posed as the fond mistress of a man whom her coldness gradually repelled until his pride revolted. Held in his arms, treated still as the child, kissed upon her lips, all her sentiment appealed to by his ardour, she tried to say that this was her destiny, beyond which she might not look. Hundreds had drifted as she into that desert of the waters where no tide of life emerges nor harbours of a man's love are to be found. She had been tricked by circumstance, and delusion must be paid for by the years.
Be it said that this was chiefly an aftermath of the busy weeks. While the shadow lay upon England, the fame of her work had blinded her to the true meaning of the promise Harry Lassett had won from her in an irresponsible hour. Swiftly, upon the tide of the national misfortune, she had risen to notoriety; been applauded in the public press and named as a heroine for her work at Stepney. When that work was ended; when England awoke one day to the thunders of a thanksgiving more real than any in her story, then she learned for the first time by what means her triumph had been won, and whose hand had guided her through the darkness.
The letter came from Paris, one of the very first the mails brought in. Well she remembered afterwards how that there had been a bruit of the passing of the frost many days before the deliverance came. Crowds who had learned to say that the American engineer, John Faber, had been the master mind during the terrible weeks; that his were the wheat ships now coming into the ports; that his genius and his money had accomplished miracles—these crowds heard with new hope of his promise that the weather was breaking, and the end at hand. Waiting patiently during the momentous hours, London slept one night through a bitter frost to awake next day to a warm south wind and a burning sunshine. Never shone sun so kindly upon a people which mourned its heritage. The oldest became as children in that hour of deliverance. The church bells rang for a peace, not with men, but with God.
The island home! God, what it had meant to them all in the past! And they had dwelt in ignorance; blind to their possession; regardless of the good sea which sheltered them; of the ramparts which were their salvation. Now, as in a flash, they perceived the truth: the gifts were returned to them; the meanest knew that he was free. In a frenzy which the circumstances may have justified, men took train for the seaports and watched the passing of the ice. They stood upon the high cliffs and beheld the sun shining upon the open waters; lakes of golden light at the heart of the ocean—a widening girdle of security their country had put on. The loftiest imagination could not soar to the true heights of this revelation, or embrace it wholly in the earlier hours. The dullest were dumb for very fear that the Almighty would but trick them after all.
In London, it was as though the whole people took one great breath together. Just as upon the conclusion of a peace, the church bells were rung and the City illuminated. Vast crowds poured from the houses, and gave themselves up to the most childish manifestations of joy. There were scenes to disgrace the story; scenes to lift it to great nobility. But yesterday, it had seemed to some of these revellers that they were no longer the inhabitants of an island which the strongest power would hesitate to assail. All the tradition and glory of the kingdom had gone out of it—to return in a twinkling at the passing of the frost.