CHAPTER XVII THE SEVEN YEARS
The human imagination, which responds easily to the narration of an immediate sorrow, is unable to comprehend that suffering which has no end, for the imagination of man is powerless before the stretch of time, which always surprises and mystifies it. Hence the difficulty of making comprehensible the agony of the seven years' waiting in which Sheila suddenly found herself; as though she had suddenly awakened in the embrace of a dungeon, forgotten and without hope. For man can conceive of the future only in the terms of the past, and if time, when reviewed, has the ironical property of amazing contraction, it has, when anticipated, according to the intensity of the desire, the illimitable power of extension with something of the mysterious cruelty of death, incessantly multiplied and incessantly possible.
What is seven years in the human life? In the past it is a breath, in the future it is eternal. In the memory it ceases to exist or stands only as a vague gap which one seeks bewildered and with a sense of loss. In the future, for the convict who awaits his liberty, for the genius who runs the streets unrecognized, for the lover and the heir, seven years stretches beyond the human vision and has something of the quality of eternal punishment.
Seven years to eat out her soul in patience, seven years to mortify unquenchable desires, seven years to contemplate the autumn of her youth arriving, to have all just beyond reach, to gain all just too late, and to suffer each day the pangs of a queen in exile—this was the aspect to the distracted woman of these inexorable seven years on the morning after the revelation of the lawyer. She had not realized it at once. She began to comprehend it in the morning after a night of agony.
When Bofinger returned the next afternoon he found her shattered and inert. She had passed from the horror of waiting to a recoil from the suffering she must begin, as a damned soul might shrink at the brink of the unending atonement. She did the natural thing. She refused to believe that Fargus could be dead. Then, as though to surrender the thought of the millions was as painful as to wait for the half of one, she found a wretched consolation in the hope that Fargus had found the mines and had pretended death, until by careful espionage he could satisfy himself that she was worthy.
Bofinger had his reasons for keeping her in ignorance of her legal rights. He did not inform her that she could apply to the courts for an allowance, for he wished to keep everything in his hands, fearing specially the danger of her falling into honest guidance. Two things he wished to avoid, her learning the value of her inheritance and, in his selfishness, her spending what would undoubtedly be a liberal allowance. To make more secure his hold he loaned her the sum requisite for her needs, twelve hundred a year, taking notes of acknowledgment at twelve months for double the amount, which by constant exchange he calculated to swell to usorious figures. Also it suited his precautions that she should be forced to live frugally and separated from the world, for he knew the dangers of her nature which, were the opportunity presented, would sacrifice everything for instant luxury. Without his suspecting it, one thing abetted his end. Sheila's account at the bank terminated with her first credit. Seeing that she refused, for some unaccountable reason, to surrender the hope of Fargus's return, he encouraged her in that persuasion, pretending also to fear some ruse of his eccentric nature.
For two years Sheila clung to this obstinate hope, and at times thereafter she returned to it desperately, but at the beginning of the fourth year she abandoned her dream utterly and resigned herself to despair, with the revolt of one who can accuse but fate and sees herself the sport of some divine cruelty. In brief, as the history of such daily grief can no more be told than comprehended, six years passed and, amazed, she beheld the beginning of the last period.