Lady Dashwood looked up into her face, and May was startled at the expression of suffering in the eyes.
"Go, dear, if you want to! I shall stay up—till he comes in. Yes, go, May!"
"You won't feel lonely?" said May, and she sighed without knowing that she did so.
"No," said Lady Dashwood.
May bent down and kissed her aunt's brow. It was burning hot. She caressed her cheek with her hand, then kissed her again and went out. As May met the cooler air of the staircase, she murmured to herself, "I'm a coward to leave her alone—alone when she is so wretched. Oh, what a coward I am!"
She shivered as she went up the stairs, and as soon as she was in her own room she put up the lights, and then she locked the door, and having done this she took off her dress and put on her dressing-gown. She sat down by the fire. How was she to stay on here till Monday: how was she to endure it? It would be intolerable! May groaned aloud. What right had she to call it intolerable? What had happened to her? What was demoralising her, turning her strength into weakness? What was it that had entered into her soul and was poisoning its health and destroying its purpose?
A few days ago and she had been steadily pursuing her work. She had been stifling her sorrow, and filling the vacancy of her life with voluntary labour. Having no child of her own, she had been filling her empty arms with the children of other women. She had fed and nursed and loved babies that would never call her "Mother." She had had no time to think of herself—no time for regrets—for self-pity. And now, suddenly, her heart that had been quieted and comforted, her heart that had seemed quieted and comforted, her heart dismissed all this tender and sacred work and cried for something else—cried and would not be appeased. She felt as if all that she had believed fixed and certain in herself and in her life, was shaken and might topple over, and in the disaster her soul might be destroyed. She was appalled at herself.
No, no; she must wrestle with this sin, with this devil of self; she must fight it!
She got up from her chair and went to the dressing-table. There she took up with a trembling hand a little ivory case, and going back to her seat she opened it reverently and looked at the face of her boy husband. There he was in all the bloom of his twenty and six years. It was a young pleasant face. And he had been such a comrade of her childhood and girlhood. But strangely enough he had never seen the gulf widening between them as she grew into a woman older than her years and he into a man, young for his years; boyish in his view of life, mentally immature. He was quite unconscious that he never met the deeper wants of her nature; those depths meant nothing to him. There had been a tacit understanding between them from their childhood that they should marry; an understanding encouraged by their parents. When at last May found out her mistake; that this bondage was irksome and her heart unsatisfied, he had suddenly thrown the responsibility of his happiness, of his very life, upon her shoulders, not by threats of vengeance on himself, but by falling from his usual buoyant cheerfulness into a state of uncomplaining despondency.
May had had more than her share of men's admiration. Her piquancy and ready sympathy more even than her good looks attracted them. But she had gone on her way heart whole, and meanwhile she could not endure to see her old comrade unhappy.