“The consciousness of battle,” Rhoda repeated to herself. “Perhaps that was what St. Paul felt when he found a law in his members warring against the law in his mind. And perhaps it’s a bad thing to be conscious of no warfare at all.”
And then she began to wonder if she were anything like Robert Clarris before he fell. Had she ever really heard the Lord’s voice? Were not her ears deafened by the clamour of self-conceit? Alas, it goes ill with us when we mistake the voice of self-congratulation for the voice of God!
But there came a time when Rhoda reached the very bottom of the Valley of Humiliation. She grew conscious that she, a strong, self-reliant woman, had silently given a love that had never been asked of her. When a man takes a woman by the hand, and lifts her above her old self, it is ten to one that she falls in love with him.
We all know what it is to wonder at the change that love makes in a woman. We have marvelled often what that clever man could have seen in this commonplace girl, but we admit that he has made her a new creature. Perhaps, like the great sculptor, he attacked the marble block with Divine fervour, believing that an angel was imprisoned in it. And his instincts were not wrong after all. The shapeless stone was chipped away and the beautiful form revealed.
But Rhoda had no reason to think that Ralph Channell cared for her more than for others. In every respect he was above her. The rector (rectors are great persons in country villages) had found out that Mr. Channell was a thoughtful and cultivated man. The rector’s family said that he was charming, and they wondered why he shut himself up with the Farrens in their dull cottage. Nobody ever intimated that he was thinking of Rhoda. All the country people had settled that she was to be an old maid. She was too good for the farmers, and not good enough for the squires’ sons. And for many a year Rhoda had been very comfortably resigned to her fate.
Bit by bit, however, she had let her heart go, and she awoke one day, suddenly and miserably, to the knowledge that she had parted with the best part of herself. There is no need to tell how or when she made the discovery. A chance word, a trivial incident, may send us to look into the casket where we kept our treasure, and we find it empty.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER X.