And still, that nervous thrill passing over her like wind, Helen stood at the gate looking towards the west. With one of those sudden changes to which her temperament is liable, a flood of bitter thoughts had suddenly stolen into her mind. It was not envious repining, it was scarcely discontent; but she began to remember that there in her youth she stood alone—that the very strength which she had to earn bread for herself and her mother, by her own honourable labour, had cast her down in the small society about them, to a lower and to a solitary place—that those bright youthful days, to others so instinct with joyous life, were to her days of gloomy labour, evenings of solitude. And thronging in the rear of these, were hosts of indefinite, rapid, inexpressible feelings; remembrances of petty slights and proud swellings of the wounded heart, which in spite of its years of independent working, was still but a girl’s. The deep melancholy and depression peculiar to her nature—peculiar only in transient fits, soon swept away by the inherent strength of life and hope within—lowered over her like a cloud. There came to her eyes involuntary causeless tears: her heart grew blank and dark within her, and wistfully she looked upward to the sky—the wonderful western sky with its flushed clouds of sunset—thinking in her sad, proud loneliness that only this was left to her of the natural gladnesses of youth.
Just then an eager hand was thrust into hers, and the joyous voice of Hope Oswald broke in upon her reverie.
“Helen, Helen, what makes you always stand here and look at the sun?”
The momentary distemper tinged even her speech.
“Because I like to see him sink, Hope. I like to watch him gliding away yonder behind the hill, and see how blank and cold it all looks after he is gone.”
“Ay! but, Helen, look how beautiful the clouds are,” said Hope, “you would think the sun was hiding yonder. See, see! how grand it is!—and him away all the time beyond the hill. You will not look, Helen: but I think the clouds are as beautiful as the sun.”
“And in half an hour they will all have melted away,” said the young moralizer, “and so does everything in the world that is beautiful, Hope. The fair colours fade into that pale, blank grey, and the air grows chill and mournful, and then comes the night.”
“But do you not like the night, Helen?” asked the wondering Hope.
“I was not thinking of the night, I was thinking of what comes upon us in the world,” said Helen dreamily in her self-communion, “and how the dull colourless sky droops over us, and the light passes away, and the inexorable darkness comes.”
She paused—she was fairly afloat on this dark stream of thought, becoming sadder and more downcast with every word she spoke. The causeless tears hung upon her eyelashes, her lips quivered and faltered; the deep cloud of characteristic melancholy had fallen like a veil upon her heart.