Hadria’s reels were celebrated, not without reason. Some mad spirit seemed to possess her. It would appear almost as if she had passed into a different phase of character. She lost caution and care and the sense of external events.
When the dance was ended, Hubert led her from the hall. She went as if in a dream. She would not allow herself to be taken beyond the sound of the grotesque old dance music that was still going on, but otherwise she was unresisting.
He sat down beside her in a corner of the dining-room. Now and then he glanced at his companion, and seemed about to speak. “You seem fond of your national music,” he at last remarked.
“It fills me with bewildering memories,” she said in a dreamy tone. “It seems to recall—it eludes description—some wild, primitive experiences—mountains, mists—I can’t express what northern mysteries. It seems almost as if I had lived before, among some ancient Celtic people, and now, when I hear their music—or sometimes when I hear the sound of wind among the pines—whiffs and gusts of something intensely familiar return to me, and I cannot grasp it. It is very bewildering.”
“The only thing that happens to me of the kind is that curious sense of having done a thing before. Strange to say, I feel it now. This moment is not new to me.”
Hadria gave a startled glance at her companion, and shuddered.
“I suppose it is all pre-ordained,” she said. He was puzzled, but more hopeful than usual. Hadria might almost have accepted him in sheer absence of mind. He put the thought in different terms. He began to speak more boldly. He gave his view of life and happiness, his philosophy and religion. Hadria lazily agreed. She lay under a singular spell. The bizarre old music smote still upon the ear. She felt as if she were in the thrall of some dream whose events followed one another, as the scenes of a moving panorama unfold themselves before the spectators. Temperley began to plead his cause. Hadria, with a startled look in her eyes, tried to check him. But her will refused to issue a vigorous command. Even had he been hateful to her, which he certainly was not, she felt that she would have been unable to wake out of the nightmare, and resume the conduct of affairs. The sense of the importance of personal events had entirely disappeared. What did it all matter? “Over us stars and under us graves.” The graves would put it all right some day. As for attempting to direct one’s fate, and struggle out of the highways of the world—midsummer madness! It was not only the Mrs. Gordons, but the Valeria Du Prels who told one so. Everybody said (but in discreeter terms), “Disguise from yourself the solitude by setting up little screens of affections, and little pompous affairs about which you must go busily, and with all the solemnity that you can muster.”
The savage builds his mud hut to shelter him from the wind and the rain and the terror of the beyond. Outside is the wilderness ready to engulf him. Rather than be left alone at the mercy of elemental things, with no little hut, warm and dark and stuffy, to shelter one, a woman will sacrifice everything—liberty, ambition, health, power, her very dignity. There was a letter in Hadria’s pocket at this moment, eloquently protesting in favour of the mud hut.
Hadria must have been appearing to listen favourably to Temperley’s pleading, for he said eagerly, “Then I have not spoken this time quite in vain. I may hope that perhaps some day——”
“Some day,” repeated Hadria, passing her hand across her eyes. “It doesn’t really matter. I mean we make too much fuss about these trifles; don’t you think so?” She spoke dreamily. The music was jigging on with strange merriment.