After an absence of one week she came back to London, crushed, weary, and heart-sick. Her life seemed to be over. She had seen him again, but he was dead. There was nothing she could do, it was all over. If only she had Paul! She could have screamed with the torture of fate. She realised the disappointment of life, that nothing could be as it had been. A new life might come to her, but she could never gather the old one together again. Perhaps some day she would be reminded of the past when she had forgotten. To be reminded it is necessary to have forgotten. But now she suffered—now she wanted everything she had not. She felt the torture of the vain longing for the impossible; a blister on her body would have been a relief; there was one on her soul. She wished she had told her father about Paul; she wished she could forget Paul; she wished he were there with her, and then she resolved again to forget him.
She wrote to Mr. Wainbridge and told him of her terrible trouble. It was a relief to pour out her mind to someone who understood, and to whom she could say mad things—whether he sympathised or not she did not care.
She was rich, and inundated with letters of sympathy. Each writer considered herself the one consoler Launa required. Men do not write that kind of letter; they merely leave cards.
Mrs. Carden sent pages of lamentation and exhortation, interspersed with demands for one interview, just one, with her dearest Launa.
Lily Herbert came up to town for the day. She was sorry for Launa when she could remember to be so. It was with great difficulty she could disguise the cheerful grin her countenance had assumed since her marriage. She could not understand Launa’s abandonment to grief. If Sir John had died Lily would have wept, when reflecting on her lonely position, and then have smiled over the patterns of new mourning.
Launa remained dumb to her and with her; Lily realised at last, with a certain sort of awe, that Launa was stricken; that she was full of sorrow which was not easily ended, and that she could not bear attempts at consolation, which were merely, and only could be, attempts. Who can raise the dead? Launa passed through the lonely dark valley of nevermore—of hunger for one face, for one word, which is so intense as to be torture, and to which was added the desire for the presence of a man whom she felt was unfaithful to her. Could she bear another man’s kisses? How could he then kiss another woman?
To stay in London was impossible for her, and so she chose to go to a little village in Derbyshire which her father had loved as a boy. The Black Country, with its barren moors and lonely stonewalled hills, attracted her; the warm valleys full of bracken and alder bushes, through which the rushing mountain streams tore, had a wild beauty and a lulling power. It was very lonely and bleak. She could walk for miles without seeing anyone, and the people she did meet were for the most part only villagers. Much as she longed to see “Solitude” again, she felt the impossibility of going there.
During all these long, long days of sorrow and direful longing, Mr. Wainbridge wrote to her. Almost every day a letter came, and she began to look for them and to answer them. At first she had only sent him scrawls, but he had gradually drifted into an intimate—a most intimate friend.
She often re-read his letters, and there was more in them than the actual words said. She gave him credit for an intuition which he did not possess. He loved her, and he divined that she did not love him; she could almost love him for that. Women usually love men for imaginary qualities. She thought him brave and pure; she fancied he loved what she did, instead of which he loved her. Her personality made life interesting; her playing made music an everlasting joy.
The day after she was settled at Fair View she had a long letter from him in answer to her first coherent one.