Anne was self-trained in the habit of detachment. She had only to kneel, to close her eyes and cover her face, and her soul slid of its own accord into the place of peace. Her very breathing and the beating of her heart were stayed. Her mind, emptied in a moment, was in a moment filled, brimming over with the thought of God. To her veiled vision that thought was like a sheet of blank light let down behind her drooped eyelids, and centring in a luminous whorl. It fascinated her. Her prayer shot straight to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the blessed light.
In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast into the secular darkness.
She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him. Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him from her as she would, the idea of his goodness—the goodness that justified her through its own appeal—would call up his presence, emerging radiant from the outermost abyss. Inferior emotions then mingled indistinguishably with her holiest ardours. Spiritually ambitious, she had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy. It was no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the silver and fine gold of her wings.
It was the facility of the revelation that had first caused her to suspect it. And she had thrown ashes on the flame, and set a watch upon her soul, lest she should mistake an earthly for a heavenly content. She could not bear to think that she was cheated, that her pulses counted in her sense of exaltation and beatitude. She desired, purely, the utmost purity in that divine communion, so as to be sure that it was divine.
Now, having suffered, she was completely sure. Her wound was the seal God set upon her soul. It was easy enough now for her to achieve detachment, oblivion of Walter Majendie, to pour out her whole soul in the prayer for light: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night."
Her hands, as she prayed, were folded close over her eyes. Having annihilated her husband, she was disagreeably astonished to find that he was there, that he had been there for some time, in the seat beside her.
He was sitting in what he took to be an attitude of extreme reverence, his head bowed and resting on his left arm, which was supported by the back of the seat in front of him. His right arm embraced, unconsciously, Anne's muff. Anne was vividly, painfully aware of him. Over the crook of his elbow one eye looked up at her, bright, smiling with inextinguishable affection. His lips gave out a sound that was not a prayer, but something between a murmur and a moan, distinctly audible. She felt his gaze as a gross, tangible thing, as a violent hand, parting the veils of prayer. She bowed her head lower and pressed her hands to her face till the blood tingled.
The sermon obliged her to sit upright and exposed. It gave him iniquitous opportunity. He turned in his seat; his eyes watched her under half-closed lids, two slits shining through the thick, dark curtain of their lashes. He kept on pulling at his moustache, as if to hide the dumb but expressive adoration of his mouth. Anne, who felt that her soul had been overtaken, trapped, and bared to the outrage, removed herself by a yard's length till the hymn brought them together, linked by the book she could not withhold. The music penetrated her soul and healed its hurt.
"Christian, doth thou see them,
On the holy ground,
How the troops of Midian
Prowl and prowl around?"
sang Anne in a dulcet pianissimo, obedient to the choir.