The girl from nowhere

by Mrs. Baillie Reynolds

As its slow hours crept by, she grew to have a feeling that she had been traveling ever since she could remember, and must go on traveling till she died. The train moved on, and on, and on, like a thing which, once started, can never stop again. After the first twelve hours she had a bad attack of train sickness, an ailment from which she had never before suffered; and she lay sleepless during the night hours, with aching head and parched mouth, tossing about on her berth, and with her mind unable to detach itself, even for a moment, from a thought so dreadful that never, till faced by this dreary solitude, had she dared to put it into words.

She knew, she had known, ever since their interview in the rock garden, that she no more loved Denzil than she loved his absent brother. She did not love him, and she vehemently desired not to marry him. Yet, somehow or other, she had caused him to believe that she returned his affection. She was, practically, engaged to him. She had deceived both brothers, and it seemed to her that, search as deeply as might be into her own heart, she had not done so wittingly.

The case simply was that her heart had never been aroused. Her hour had not come. She did not know love. Each of these two young men had wanted of her something which she had not to bestow. To each she had offered in return something else. There was, however, one notable distinction between the two affairs. Felix had excited her best feelings. She had felt for him pity, sympathy, the instinctive womanly desire to comfort and sympathize with the lonely, the unfortunate. Denzil, on the other hand, had stood in her imagination for home, peace, safety, well-being. It had been her selfishness which had responded to his call. He could give her an assured position, and life in the surroundings which she loved. Felix was the asker, Denzil the bestower. To marry Felix demanded sacrifice; to marry Denzil was to accept benefits at his hands.

But, if she considered which of the two had the more claim upon her allegiance, she found herself bewildered, divided. Felix had saved her life, but Denzil had preserved it. As she envisaged the situation, she felt that the die was cast. Her letter to Felix had bound her to Denzil. She wondered, over and over to herself, whether Felix had received that letter, and what he had felt upon reading it. Here, in her isolated loneliness, far from Aunt Bee, far from Denzil, she began to have an inkling as to what letters would mean to the exile, and to realize what Felix might have experienced, upon seeing her writing, snatching open the envelope, and reading the complete extinction of her own feeling for himself....

Was his present disappearance—could it be—the result of her cruelty? Had it made him reckless?

Such thoughts poisoned the weary hours of the endless night. And through them all beat upon her brain the knowledge that Denzil was ill, so ill that he had wired for them to come to him. He would not have taken so extreme a course, had his sickness not been serious—had he not been in danger.

What should she do, if after the bitter strain of her long journey, she found him dead when she arrived at Savlinsky?

She pictured herself alone, in the mining village, with no woman near, with nobody but Vronsky, the Russian! Was it, after all, mad of her to undertake such a journey?

She was thankful to rise from her sleepless couch, and shake off the wild dreams which visited her with every moment of unconsciousness. The varying country, the dim Ural Mountains, into the heart of which they ascended, the increasingly strange garb of the people, left hardly any impression upon her usually active mind. But during the day she rallied from her misgivings of the previous night, and girded at herself for a coward.

There was nothing to take off her mind from its treadmill of apprehensions. The lady who was her fellow-traveler spoke English, but was very dull, and most likely herself thought the girl unresponsive. It had proved impossible to get English books for the journey, and she was without refuge from the harassing thoughts which yelped about her like snapping wolves.