She had done what had seemed to her right in the best way which had been open to her. But she could not be sure of the result. She had used great volition, great energy, great resistance in her late work, and her strength had for the time spent itself. It had left a solitude round her in which her personal ego seemed to awake and cry like a lost child in the dark.
Her future wore no smile and offered her no companionship. Whilst her mother lived she felt that she must not leave her; and Margaret Massarene was strong and hale, and likely to live long. Whilst her mother lived she could never herself attempt to lead any other existence than that which she led now. True, in it she could study as much as she pleased, but study in this moment of depression did not seem to her the Alpha and Omega of life as it always had done.
All that she had heard, seen, and learned of brutal practical appetites and needs within the past twelve months haunted her; she had cast from her her father’s wealth, but she could not shake off the shadow of his sins. His memory pursued her like a ghost.
It was a morbid and exaggerated idea, she knew that; no one shunned her, no one execrated her—at the utmost people thought her an absurd quixotic young woman, absolutely uninteresting now that she had divested herself of her golden ornaments: she knew that. But she felt herself in spirit and in destiny like the hangman’s daughter, as Hurstmanceaux had said, who, through no fault of her own, was shunned by all, and execrated by all, merely because she was the hangman’s daughter!
One day, soon after her return, she was walking again through that pine-wood on the little estate in which, nearly a year earlier, she had been greeted by Framlingham. She had a reefer’s jacket on her arm, and held a white sunshade over her head, for the air was very mild. Her gown was of that pale silvery grey which she often wore; there were a few Malmaison roses and a ruffle of old lace at her throat. She walked slowly and with no energy suggested in her movements; in truth, she felt weary and spiritless. For many months both her intelligence and her volition had been stretched like a bent bow, and now that they were spent the inevitable reaction set in with both her will and her mind. She had accomplished her great task; it was done and could not be undone; she had no illusions about its success, she could only hope that it might bear good fruit.
The grey, still, windless day was without a sound. Even the sea was voiceless. The weather and the landscape seemed languid and mournful, like herself. She could not regain her lost energy. She felt as if she had given it away with her father’s fortune.
As regarded her own future she had no illusions either. She expected nothing agreeable from it. She knew that her mother had said quite rightly—she would never be happy. Her nature was proud and everything connected with her caused her shame. Her affections would have been strong, but they had no object. Her talents were unusual, but they were out of harmony with her destiny and her generation. It seemed to her that she had been only created to carry on in her own soul a mute and barren revolt against all the received opinions and objects of the world in general. Was the world right, and was she wrong? Had she been presumptuous and vain-glorious in opposing her own single opinion to the vast serried masses of human prejudice and custom?
She made her way slowly through the pine trees and the rhododendrons to the bench where she had sat with Framlingham, from which the sea was seen and the shores of Tennyson’s island were visible. It was a fine calm day, with diaphanous mists in the silvery offing. She thought of the line in the “Prometheus,” and of Lecomte de Lisle’s beautiful rendering of it: “Le sourire infini des flots marins.”
Some fishing cobles were half a mile off, trawling; in the offing a white-winged vessel—a yacht, no doubt—was bearing toward the island; inland, some church bells were ringing far away, but sweet as a lark’s song. She sat still and wished that she could feel as poets felt, which was perhaps being more near them than she knew. She had sat there some time, the roses faded in the light, and she was so motionless that some wrens in the pine boughs over her head picked larvæ off the branches without heeding her.
She had been there an hour or more, Argus sometimes chasing imaginary rabbits, sometimes lying at her feet, when steps crushing the carpet of pine needles behind her made her turn her head.