But all the way home Geneviève never spoke.
[CHAPTER II.]
AFTER THE BALL.
“Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair;
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary, fu’ o’ care!
Ye’ll break my heart, ye warbling birds
That wanton through the flow’ry thorn;
Ye mind me o’ departed joys,
Departed never to return.”
IT was a very dark night. The full moon, whose services had been reckoned upon to light the guests to and from the Lingthurst ball, was not in an obliging humour. She had gone to bed again in the clouds so early, and the curtains behind which she had hidden herself were so thick, that, for all the use she had been of, she might as well not have risen at all. It was so dark that the cautious old Greystone coachman thought it necessary to drive extra slowly; it seemed to Cicely that hours, if not whole days, or nights rather, had passed, when at last they turned in at the Abbey gates.
Not that she cared. She was not eager to be home now—what comfort could meet her there?—anywhere? What was anything in life to her now? What was life itself? A horrible mockery, a delusion, a sham from beginning to end. There was no goodness, no loyalty, no truth. All these things she had once—long ago it seemed already—believed in so firmly, that till now she had never realised how largely such faith had formed a part of her existence, or how frightful could be the results of its destruction. Already she had tasted the bitterest drop of the bitter cup; she had been deceived by her nearest and dearest—by the one of all the world who should have been true to her.
“If even he had trusted me,” she moaned, “if he had come and told me all, I could have borne it. I am not beautiful as she is, I could have forgiven him; I could have believed that this new love had come upon him unawares, and that he had fought against it. If he had trusted me!”
To Geneviève, to her share in the whole, Cicely, in this first chaos of misery and indignation somehow hardly gave a thought. She shrank from her, it is true. She was thankful that Geneviève’s silence prevented the necessity of addressing her, but whatever Geneviève had done, however great her portion of responsibility, she was only Geneviève—a new-comer, a comparative stranger. False-hearted, scheming, unscrupulous she might be—in a sense it did not seem to matter; for her conduct there was at least the possibility of the excuse of ignorance and inexperience,—there was not the aggravation of a broken vow, of life-long affection trampled under foot.
Over and over again during the three quarters of an hour’s drive from Lingthurst these bitter thoughts chased each other round Cicely’s excited brain. The practical results of her discovery, the explanation she must come to with Trevor, what she must say to her parents, how they would look upon Geneviève—all these points she as yet forgot to consider. Extreme misery makes even the best of us selfish for the time. In Cicely’s nature there was no lack of magnanimity, but the first instinct of the victim is not to heap coals of fire upon the head of him whose hand has dealt the cruel blow. Forgiveness, sincere and generous, would come in due time; but not yet. It was no small injury which Cicely Methvyn had received; that it would leave a life-long scar there could be no doubt: would the wound ever heal? was the question at present. Could the faith, once shattered so cruelly, ever again be made whole?
“If I live to be a hundred I can never endure greater suffering than that of this evening,” thought Cicely, as the carriage stopped at last and the cousins got out. That her present suffering could be increased—even, in a sense, overwhelmed by an anguish of a totally different nature—she would have maintained to be all but impossible. At twenty we are apt to be over hasty in declaring that we have already drunk of misery to the very dregs.