Her loneliness grew upon her—penetrated and pursued her. She could not resign herself to it. She was always struggling with it, beating it away, as a frightened child might struggle with the wave that overwhelms it on the beach. A few weeks ago she had been so happy, so rich in friends—the world had been so warm and kind!
And now it seemed to her that she had no friends; no one to whom she could turn; no one she wished to see, except this girl—this girl she had known barely a couple of months—by whom she had been made desolate!
She thought of those winter gatherings in Rome which she had enjoyed with so keen a pleasure; the women she had liked, who had liked her in return, to whom her eager wish to love and be loved had made her delightful. But beneath her outward sweetness she carried a proud and often unsuspected reserve. She had made a confidante of no one. That her relation to Manisty was accepted and understood in Rome; that it was regarded as a romance, with which it was not so much ill-natured as ridiculous to associate a breath of scandal—a romance which all kind hearts hoped might end as most of such things should end—all this she knew. She had been proud of her place beside him, proud of Rome's tacit recognition of her claim upon him. But she had told her heart to nobody. Her wild scene with Lucy stood out unique, unparalleled in the story of her life.
And now there was no one she craved to see—not one. With the instinct of the stricken animal she turned from her kind. Her father? What had he ever been to her? Aunt Pattie? Her very sympathy and pity made Eleanor thankful to be parted from her. Other kith and kin? No! Happy, she could have loved them; miserable, she cared for none of them. Her unlucky marriage had numbed and silenced her for years. From that frost the waters of life had been loosened, only to fail now at their very source.
Her whole nature was one wound. At the moment when, standing spell-bound in the shadow, she had seen Manisty stooping over the unconscious Lucy, and had heard his tender breathless words, the sword had fallen, dividing the very roots of being.
And now—strange irony!—the only heart on which she leant, the only hand to which she clung, were the heart and the hand of Lucy!
'Why, why are we here?' she cried to herself with a sudden change of position and of anguish.
Was not their flight a mere absurdity?—humiliation for herself, since it revealed what no woman should reveal—but useless, ridiculous as any check on Manisty! Would he give up Lucy because she might succeed in hiding her for a few weeks? Was that passionate will likely to resign itself to the momentary defeat she had inflicted on it? Supposing she succeeded in despatching Lucy to America without any further interview between them; are there no steamers and trains to take impatient lovers to their goal? What childish folly was the whole proceeding!
And would she even succeed so far? Might he not even now be on their track? How possible that he should remember this place—its isolation—and her pleasure in it! She started in her chair. It seemed to her that she already heard his feet upon the road.
Then her thought rebounded in a fierce triumph, an exultation that shook the feeble frame. She was secure! She was entrenched, so to speak, in Lucy's heart. Never would that nature grasp its own joy at the cost of another's agony. No! no!—she is not in love with him!—the poor hurrying brain insisted. She has been interested, excited, touched. That, he can always achieve with any woman, if he pleases. But time and change soon wear down these first fancies of youth. There is no real congruity between them—there never, never could be.