CHAPTER IX.
uring the days that followed she was shut up in the cottage alone; and no one entered save Jane Mitchell, who came in the morning to light the fire while the remnant of coal lasted, and then was sent away.
“I shall not require you any more,” she said to Lucas, when he came to ask if she wanted the pony. She was covered with shame, and could never drive along the roads again.
“No, I do not need any provisions,” she said to Jane Mitchell, who offered to do some shopping for her; “I have sufficient in the house, and I will not trouble you to come again, Jane, until this day week”—and, having securely fastened the outer doors, she went to the drawing-room.
“I shall be dead by then,” she thought, “and Jane will find me.”
She was terribly ill, but she did not know it. The cold and the damp of that long day in London and afterwards had laid hold on her. She coughed, and knew that swift pains went through her, and a load was on her chest, but she had no time to notice these things. She had had no food for days. Save a little milk in a cup, and some bread, there was nothing left when Jane Mitchell took her departure. She was being slowly starved; she knew it, and did not care. The awful shame, the misery, the agony, that had overtaken her, stifled all other feelings, and were killing her; she knew that, too, and waited for death. Everything had gone out of her life; there was nothing to come into it more. She had been proud of her memories, her unsullied past, her own spotlessness—“Now it is all gone,” she said to herself. Every memory was a reproach or was hideous. She sat on one of the chairs before the drawing-room fireplace, and thought and thought and thought, till she could bear it no longer. It seemed as if pain were stamping the life out of her, as if she must be dying; she could feel that she was dying; but life remained by a little, and grew keen, and tortured her again. The key was turned in the lock of Alfred Wimple’s room, but his touch was on everything in the house; and a shrinking from it was her strongest feeling concerning him. Even the sight of a cup from which he had drunk made her shudder more than the bitter cold. “The place is contaminated,” she said to herself; “it is poisoned.” Sometimes for a few minutes a little tenderness would try to push its way into her heart again, but she shrank from that most of all, and with horror and loathing of herself. She was bowed down with disgrace. She felt as if by even living she was committing an offence against the whole world. There was no one she was fit to see; she had no right of any sort left, no business to be in the light; and there was no place in which she could hide. The nights were worst of all, they were so long and still; and when she had used the two candles left in the dining-room she had no means of shortening them even by an hour. Then, quaking, she lay on the hard sofa in the drawing-room, while the darkness gathered round, and the cold fastened its sharpest fangs into her. In those long hours she suffered not only her own reproaches, but the reproaches of the dead—of the dear ones she had loved in bygone years. From every corner they seemed to come—through the closed door and in at the curtained windows; troops of them—till she could bear it no longer, and dared not see the darkness that seemed to be growing white with their faces. But when she closed her eyes it was no better: they came a little closer and touched her with their hands, as if they would push her a little farther into space; she was not fit to be among them. The friends of her girlhood, with whom she had played and shared her little secrets, came from the strange world into which they had carried the memory of their own blameless lives. They looked at her reproachfully, and went away; she would never be one of them now, even in eternity. And there was one more; she could see him coming softly through the shadows. He stood beside her, and she cowered and hid her face. Then she knew that he was sorry and understood that, in some grotesque manner, it had been done half for love of him. It comforted her a little to think this, while she turned her face down to the cushion, and sobbed, “Forgive me, I am so ashamed—so ashamed.” At last, perhaps, she would ache with fever and cold, and the sharp pains went through her again. She welcomed these almost lovingly, thinking that perhaps they meant the coming of the end; and gradually, as the morning broke, she would doze off into a weary sleep.