Brand was awaiting her, he had arrived twelve hours before. Their interview was brief. He took the money, and promised what she asked. He would never trouble her again; this was the end.
She did not take his hand; she could not. At the last he turned.
"You're a good woman, Evelyn," he said suddenly.
That chapter of her life was closed, and she set out for the unknown.
She was bending her steps towards a radiant vision—Monserrato. Years before, on a night's journey from Barcelona, she had come upon it unexpectedly in the dawn. Her fellow-travellers in the compartment had departed; she was just then alone with her companion, a portly lady of uncertain age, who would have slept profoundly through an earthquake. Tired and over-wrought, Evelyn had for some time been looking at the landscape with eyes which scarcely took in its significance. Suddenly, on her right, there rose a vision so startling, so mysterious, that for a moment she believed it to be the image of her brain, a supernatural vision. Spire upon spire showed before her, serrated hills, bare and austere, grey and cold in the first gleam of the morning. She saw their outlines distinctly for a full half-minute; then, as the railway line swerved, they were lost to sight, and for a little while she thought they were a dream. They looked so like hills of illusion, behind which lay God's gift of eventual peace. But as the train converged towards the station the hills came suddenly close again, and she knew them to be real.
So near at hand, they almost terrified her. One realized in face of them how Ignatius Loyola had toiled, barefoot, every step of the way across those rugged paths. They were an obvious viâ crucis. To step across them in shoes, with the ordinary trappings of civilization, was sacrilege; they compelled renunciation, the absolute denial of all that life held dear, before a believer dared set foot on that sacred pathway.
Well, she had proved her right to stand there, to walk in the way of the martyr. The bleeding of human feet is, after all, a temporary small inconvenience; when the soul bleeds, God tests its loss and gain.
Hour after hour went by; she was too tired to think or read. Now and again a sharp pain at her heart, like a blow, brought her to herself, and she had to raise herself from the cushions against which she had fallen, limp and lifeless, absolutely apathetic, to gasp for breath. The little physical interruption cleared her brain; she looked quite clearly at the future, and knew what its ensuing hours would bring. In time, probably, she would take up old threads again. Habit is strong, and friends assertive; bury herself as she would, some one would find her out and come inevitably for help or pity. But she would have to draw now upon the well of bitterness instead of a sacred fount. No matter. The water looked as crystal clear; those who sipped it would not know from what source it had sprung.
Before her interminable days, immeasurable nights. The nights were the worst. Already terror seized her in its grip. She had awakened to find herself calling upon Farquharson with passionate frenzy; shrieking to him to come and help her bear what could not be borne alone; to drive away, if it were but for an instant, the host of shapes that threatened her, the inward foes that tore at every bleeding fibre, and mocked her as they bathed themselves in the blood of her heart. When she was awake, she longed for sleep; when sleep came, she prayed for wakefulness.
That way lay mania; better death. Ah, but death comes so seldom to him who craves it as a boon; it only robs the mother of her son, the husband of the wife he cherishes, the little, helpless baby of his mother's care!——