And that was the beauty that Eleanor had herself developed and made doubly visible—as a man may free a diamond from the clay.
A mad impulse swept through her—that touch of kinship with the criminal and the murderer that may reveal itself in the kindest and the noblest.
She took up the little mask, and, reaching to the window, she tore back the curtains and pushed open the sun-shutters outside.
The night burst in upon her, the starry night hanging above the immensity of the Campagna, and the sea. There was still a faint glow in the western heaven. On the plain were a few scattered lights, fires lit, perhaps, by wandering herdsmen against malaria. On the far edge of the land to the south-west, a revolving light flashed its message to the Mediterranean and the passing ships. Otherwise, not a sign of life. Below, a vast abyss of shadow swallowed up the olive-garden, the road, and the lower slopes of the hills.
Eleanor felt herself leaning out above the world, alone with her agony and the balmy peace which mocked it. She lifted her arm, and, stretching forward, she flung the little face violently into the gulf beneath. The villa rose high above the olive-ground, and the olive-ground itself sank rapidly towards the road. The fragment had far to fall. It seemed to Eleanor that in the deep stillness she heard a sound like the striking of a stone among thick branches. Her mind followed with a wild triumph the breaking of the terra-cotta,—the shivering of the delicate features—their burial in the stony earth.
With a long breath she tottered from the window and sank into her chair. A horrible feeling of illness overtook her, and she found herself gasping for breath. 'If I could only reach that medicine on my table!' she thought. But she could not reach it. She lay helpless.
The door opened.
Was it a dream? She seemed to struggle through rushing waters back to land.
There was a low cry. A light step hurried across the room. Lucy Foster sank on her knees beside her and threw her arms about her.
'Give me—those drops—on the table,' said Eleanor, with difficulty.