Mr. Guildford left her. He was anxious to know if Mrs. Methvyn was asleep. On the staircase he met the housekeeper.
“Miss Cicely is in the hall—alone,” he said. “She knows. I have told her. Do you think you can get her to go to bed?”
Poor Mrs. Moore’s eyes were streaming. She could not speak, but she nodded her head and set off in the direction of the hall, so Mr. Guildford felt that his task was accomplished.
Cicely went to bed, and, strange as it may seem, to sleep. She was only twenty; she had never been really ill in her life, and sorrow was unfamiliar to her; there were vigour and vitality enough in her to stand a much more prolonged attack from adversity, though, as she laid her head on her pillow, she said to herself that but for her mother she would pray never to wake again.
“It could not be wrong,” she thought. “Except mother nobody wants me. Amiel has her husband, but poor mamma has only me now.” And the thought seemed a something to cling to; it made the idea of living on, notwithstanding the wreck of her future, endurable, if nothing more. So Cicely slept.
Who does not know the awful agony of the first waking after some overwhelming sorrow has befallen us? The shuddering glimmer of recollection that something has happened, the frantic clutch at the blessed unconsciousness of the sleep that is leaving us, the wild refusal to recall the truth! And, oh! the unutterable loathing at life, at existence even when at last we realize the whole and find that another day has dawned, that the heartless sunshine is over the world again, that we ourselves must eat and drink and clothe ourselves, and live! If we could see that our individual misery made its mark, if the birds would only leave off singing, if the flowers would all wither, if a veil could be drawn over the sun, would it seem quite so bad?
“No,” thought Cicely, “if the trees and the flowers and all the living things seemed to care, I think I could endure it. But they don’t—they don’t! The world is brighter than ever this morning, though the brightness has died out of my life for ever.”
She was standing by the open window in her room. She had forgotten that the blinds should be drawn down, and was gazing with reproachful appreciation at the beauty of the autumn morning. Yesterday it would have filled her with delight, to-day its very perfection repelled and wounded her. Even Nature, with whose varying moods she had been ever so ready to sympathize, whose face she had learnt to know so well, had played her false. “Why is it so fine to-day?” she said to herself; “why is it not cloudy and raining? Why should it ever be anything else, there must always have been, there always must be, thousands of people to whom the sunshine is as dreadful as it is to-day to me.”
She turned wearily away, and began to think what she had to do. She had been with her mother already this morning, and poor Mrs. Methvyn had clung to her in a way that was pitiful to see.
“You won’t leave me just yet, my darling,” her mother had whispered, and Cicely felt thankful that she could give her the assurance she asked for, without at present adding to her sorrows by explaining the real state of the case. And this reflection led to another. Her father had at least been spared the knowledge of Trevor’s faithlessness.