"Not like this—but I have lost children," said Lady Lindores. She had to pause again, her lip quivering. "To be only sorrow, there is no sorrow like that."
She had risen, and they stood together, the fantastic firelight throwing long shadows of them all over the dim and ghastly room. Suddenly Carry flung herself into her mother's arms. "Oh my innocent mother!" she cried. "Oh, mother! you only know such troubles as angels may have. Look at me! look at me! I am like a mad woman. I am keeping myself in, as you say, that I may not go mad—with joy!"
Lady Lindores gave a low terrible cry, and held her daughter in her arm, pressing her desperately to her heart as if to silence her. "No, Carry—no, no," she cried.
"It is true. To think I shall never be subject to all that any more—that he can never come in here again—that I am free—that I can be alone. Oh, mother, how can you tell what it is? Never to be alone: never to have a corner in the world where—some one else has not a right to come, a better right than yourself. I don't know how I have borne it. I don't know how I can have lived, disgusted, loathing myself. No, no; sometime else I shall be sorry when I have time to think, when I can forget what it is that has happened to me—but in the meantime I am too happy—too——"
Lady Lindores put her hand upon her daughter's mouth. "No, no, Carry—no, no; I cannot bear it—you must not say it," she cried.
Carry took her mother's hands and kissed them, and then began to sob—the tears pouring from her eyes like rain. "I will not say anything," she cried; "no, no—nothing, mother. I had to tell you to relieve my heart. I have been able to think of nothing else all these hours. I have never had so many hours to myself for years. It is so sweet to sit still and know that no one will burst the door open and come in. Here I can be sacred to myself, and sit and think: and all quiet—all quiet about me." Carry looked up, clasping her hands, with the tears dropping now and then, but a smile quivering upon her mouth and in her eyes. She seemed to have reached that height of passionate emotion—the edge where expression at its highest almost loses itself, and a blank of all meaning seems the next possibility. In her white dress, with her upturned face and the wild gleam of rapture in her eyes, she was like an unearthly creature. But to describe Lady Lindores's anguish and terror and pain would be impossible. She thought her daughter was distraught. Never in her life had she come in contact with feeling so absolute, subdued by no sense of natural fitness, or even by right and wrong. Her only comfort was that Edith had not been present to hear and see this revelation. And the truth was that her own heart, though so panic-stricken and penetrated with so much pity for the dead, understood, too, with a guilty throb, the overwhelming sense of emancipation which drove everything else from Carry's mind. She had feared it would be so. She would not allow herself to think so; but all through the darkness of the night as she drove along, she had been trembling lest she should find Carry not heart-broken but happy, yet had trusted that pity somehow would keep her in the atmosphere of gloom which ought to surround a new-made widow. It hurt Lady Lindores's tender heart that a woman should be glad when her husband died, however unworthy that husband might have been. She did her best now to soothe the excited creature, who took her excitement for happiness.
"We will talk of this no more to-night, Carry; by-and-by you will see how pitiful it all is. You will feel—as I feel. But in the meantime you are worn out. This terrible shock, even though you may think you do not feel it, has thrown you into a fever. You must let me put you to bed."
"Not here," she said with a shudder, looking round the room; "not here—I could not rest here."
"That is natural," Lady Lindores said with a sigh. "You must come with me, Carry."
"Home, mother—home! Oh, if I could!—not even to Lindores,—to one of the old poor places where we were so happy——"