Greta gasped; a thrill passed through her. There, before her, eye to eye with her once again, was the face she saw at the Ghyll!
CHAPTER XIV.
Paul went back home, carrying with him a crushed and broken spirit He threw himself into a chair in a torpor of dejection. When the servants spoke to him, he lifted to their faces two clouded eyes, heavy with suffering, and answered their questions in few words. The maid laid the supper, and told him it was ready. When she returned to clear the cloth, the supper was untouched. Paul stepped up to his mother's room, and sat down before the cold grate. The candle he carried with him burned out.
In the kitchen the servants of the farm and house gossipped long and bickered vigorously. "Whatever ails Master Paul?" "Crossed in love, maybe." "Shaf on sec woman's wit!" "Wherever has mistress gone?" "To buy a new gown, mayhap." "Sista now how a lass's first thowt runs on finery!" "Didsta hear nowt when you drove mistress to the rail, Reuben?" "Nay, nowt." "Dusta say it war thee as drove to the station this afternoon." "I wouldn't be for saying as it warn't." "Wilta be meeting Master Hugh in the forenoon, Natt?" "Nay, ax Natt na questions. He's fair tongue-tied to-neet, Natt is. He's clattering all of it to hisself—swearing a bit, and sec as that."
When the servants had gone to bed, and the house was quiet, Paul still sat in his mother's abandoned room. No one but he knew what he suffered that night. He tried to comprehend the disaster that had befallen him. Why had his mother shut herself in a convent? How should her love for him require that she should leave him? To demand answers to these questions was like knocking at the door of a tomb; the voice was silent that could reply; there came no answer save the dull, heavy, hollow echo of his own uncertain knock. All was blind, dumb, insensate torpor. No outlook; no word; no stimulating pang.
His stupor was broken by a vision that for long hours of that dead night burned in his brain like molten lead. The face which Greta had seen, and which his mother must also have seen, seemed to rise up before him as he sat in that deserted chamber. He saw his own face as he might have seen it in a glass. Not even the blackness of night could conceal it. Clear as a face seen in the day it shone and burned in that dark room. He closed his eyes to shut it out, but it was still before him. It was within him. It was imprinted in features of fire on his brain. He trembled with fear, never until that hour knowing what fear was. It acted upon him like his own ghost.
He knew it was but a phantasy, but no phantasy was ever more horrible. He got up to banish it, and it stood before him face to face. He sunk down again, and it sat beside him eye to eye.
Then it changed. For a moment it faded away into a palpitating mist, and the tension of his gaze relaxed. How blessed was that moment's respite! His thought returned to his mother. "If ever the world should mock you with your mother's name, remember that she is your mother still, and that she loved you to the last." Dear, sacred soul. Little fear that he should forget it! Little fear that the wise world should tarnish the fair shrine of that holy love! Tears of tenderness rose to his eyes, and in the midst of them he thought his mother sat before him. Her head was bent; an all-eating shame was crimsoning her pale cheek. Then he knew that other eyes were upon her, looking into her heart, prying deep down into her dead past, keeping open the heavy eyelids that could never sleep. He looked up; his own shadow was silently gazing down upon both of them.
Paul leaped to his feet and ran out of the room. Surely the spirit of his mother still inhabited the deserted chamber. Surely this was the shadow that had driven her away. Big drops of sweat rolled in beads from his forehead. He went out of the house. Heavy black clouds were adrift in a stormy sky; behind them, the bright moon was scudding.