CHAPTER XIX.
DESOLATION.
"And the stately ships go on
To the haven under the hill,
But oh for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still."
Tennyson.
ll that night Georgia's thoughts ran in a new direction—Charley Wildair. Yes, she had been face to face with the living, breathing friend of her childhood once more. The mystery that surrounded him rose up in her mind, and again she found herself wondering what he had done, what crime he had committed. Evening after evening she walked out in the same place, in the hope of seeing him again, when she was determined to speak to him at all hazards; but in vain; he came not, no one knew, or could tell her anything of him who had passed that evening. As day after day wore on, she began to regard his appearance almost in the light of an apparition—something her disordered imagination had conjured up to mock her, and at last even the hope of seeing him again, faded away.
And so a month passed on. Oh! that dreary, endless, monotonous month, with nothing but the dull routine of the school-room day after day.
There were times when Georgia would start wildly up, feeling as though she were going mad; and evening after evening, when the last lesson was said, she would throw her shawl over her shoulders and hurry out into the cold wintry weather, and walk and walk for miles with dizzy rapidity, to cool the fever in her blood. Night after night, when, unable to lie tossing on her bed, she would spring up, and, heedless of the freezing air, pace her room till morning. The wild fire in her eye, even in the presence of others, bespoke the consuming fever in her veins that seemed drying up the very source of life in her heart. Had she been leading some exciting, turbulent life, it would have been better for her; but this stagnant monotony seemed in a fair way of making her a maniac before long. There were times when her very soul would cry out with passionate yearning for what she had lost—times when an uncontrollable impulse to fly, fly, far away from this place, to search over the world for him she had left, and, in spite of all that had passed, to cling to him forever, would seize her, and she would struggle and wrestle with the fierce desire until, from very bodily weakness, she would sink down in a very stupor of despair.
It seemed to her as if a dark doom had been hanging over her from childhood and had fallen at last—a widow in fate though not in fact, an outcast from all the world, and almost with the brand of murder on her brow. But oh, if she had sinned, was not the expiation heavier than it deserved? A life of desolation, a death uncheered by a single friendly face, to live forgotten and die forlorn, that was her doom. Poor Georgia! what wonder that, frenzied and despairing, the cry of her heart should be, "My punishment is heavier than I can bear."