The terrible sense of outrage that gripped her soul and body—her body because Vere was bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh—seemed to be forcibly changing her nature, as cruel hands, prompted by murder in a heart, change form, change beauty in the effort to destroy.
That evening Hermione felt herself being literally defaced by this sensation of outrage within her, a sensation which she was powerless to expel.
She found herself praying to God that Artois might not come to the island that night. And yet, while she prayed, she felt that he was coming.
She dined with Vere, in almost complete silence—trying to love this dear child as she had always loved her, even in certain evil moments of an irresistible jealousy. But she felt immensely far from Vere, distant from her as one who does not love from one who loves; yet hideously near, too, like one caught in the tangle of an enforced intimacy rooted in a past which the present denies and rejects. Directly dinner was over they parted, driven by the mutual desire to be alone.
And then Hermione waited for that against which she had prayed.
Artois would come to the island that night. Useless to pray! He was coming. She felt that he was on the sea, environed by this strange mist that hung to-night over the waters. She felt that he was coming to Vere. She had gone to Africa to save him—in order that he might fall in love with her then unborn child.
Monstrosities, the monstrosities that are in life, deny them, beat them back, close our eyes to them as we will, rose up around her in the hot stillness. She felt haunted, terrified. She was forcibly changed, and now all the world was changing about her.
She must have relief. She could not sit there among spectres waiting for the sound of oars that would tell her Vere’s lover had come to the island. How could she detach herself for a moment from this horror?
She thought of Ruffo.
As the thought came to her she got up and went out of the house.