Celia had expected to meet with objections at home; they were more obstinate than she had looked for. But Celia was sure of her way where only her relatives’ prejudices were opposed as a barrier. She had the whip-hand of an exceptional devotion from them, fairly earned, no doubt. In this case she was able to allay some anxieties, some difficulties she over-rode; all were surprised at the willingness she displayed to make a genuine sacrifice of interests. There was conducted a quiet, polite domestic campaign, at the closing of which she was granted unconditionally, with whatever grim forewarnings, an open field in which to make her life’s mistake.
A little out of conceit with the whole matter, from the weariness of this contending—impressed, too, in spite of herself, with the pertinence of some of the objections which had been made, but staunch in her main purpose, she at last set forth to fetch Larry. As she passed the Brays’ house, a sickly surge of resentment rose from her momentary general disaccord with the world, and beat against the windows that were Judith’s, for it had been she who indirectly precipitated this adoption: without her and the indefinable pollution of her caresses, all being allowed to come to its ripeness naturally, there would not have been this effect of strain and muffled discord in bringing home the son-elect. Judith’s windows were shuttered; her gay, long-fringed hammocks taken in. Celia had heard that she was gone unexpectedly early this year.
But why—why were the windows of the grey farm-house closed and shuttered too? What could be the meaning of that? Celia could hardly believe her eyes. Never once had she seen them closed. And the door was closed, and the garden empty, and the clothes-line gone, the oleander gone. She remained for a time without getting out of the carriage, staring in puzzlement over at the house. It was like something in a dream. When she got out, she found that her knees were unsteady, and wondered at it, because she as yet felt little but a futile effort of the brain to find some common explanation of these circumstances, which only superficially, of course, seemed so unnatural. Why should not Julia for once in her life have gone on a visit, or a jaunt, or an errand? It was a long knowledge of all the conditions which made this surmise insufficient. Celia fumbled with a shutter and got it open. She made blinders with her hands and peered in. Then her heart sank away, as if one should suddenly find by the touch that a person one supposed alive was dead. It was a house from which the inmates plainly had moved away. She made the circuit of the house, examining things. All told the same story, no possibility of deceiving oneself. They had gone. Celia went to the gate and seated herself upon a stone facing the house, and stared at it. She felt no pain. Indeed, something said within her, in the tone she took discussing things sometimes, when she was drawing from a worldly philosophy: “Well, it simplifies matters.” The solution first to present itself satisfied her. The same who had placed Larry there had come for him. Perhaps they had got wind of the proposed adoption,—Julia was deeper than had been suspected,—and 429 in order that the darkness they evidently sought should be ensured past all doubt, they had prevailed upon the foster-parent to leave, like the Arabs. No house was so near that she might to any purpose have made inquiry, if she had cared to do that. But, as has been said, she was satisfied. What had happened seemed to her obvious and what, had she been a little wiser, she would have been prepared for. As she rose, she laughed, or did something more or less like it, and said aloud for the crows to hear: “What a fool I was to suppose that anything I cared so much about could go right!” She got into her phaeton and drove back. She said to them at home, and the hard sadness setting her features was in its effect vindictive, “You see, you are to have your wish, after all.” To make investigation did not even later enter her mind. She would not grant to her persecuting fate the joy of beholding her tortured with suspenses or uncertainties. She was persuaded of the worst. Her heart told her it was finished with that dream.
After that she tried to make the best of her position, to keep her mind fixed upon the advantages of her defeat. But the persistent image of Larry, the memory of his thousand ways of being dear and The Only, with the thought of never seeing him again or knowing anything further about him, made her struggle for an ordinary exterior at moments more than difficult. She came to learn the measure of the cheated feminine tenderness which, denied any natural channel, had fastened so hungrily upon that child of strangers, when it was thrown back useless upon her heart. She selected finally, to dwell upon, the best of all the possibilities: that among the people who had claimed him back—of fine race, if he resembled them—he would find all for the absence of which he had been pitied: the tender love of parents, the opportunities of a privileged life. She agreed that his case would be better than if he had been left to her. But after she had by arguments persuaded herself, when by her own logic she had reason for rejoicing, there closed down upon her a melancholy such as she had at intervals in her life suffered from before. The experience was like going into a tunnel, of which nothing could avail to lighten the darkness until by the grace of God one came out at the other side of the hill. There was no fighting it off by reason, no discovering an adequate cause for it, no foreseeing the moment of its end. One endured it like a prolonged bad dream, wherein the magnified affections shake one in one’s helplessness at their will. At such times all that had ever been pain, disappointment, defeat, however long recovered from, came again to perfect life in memory, while all that had been happy, diminished to insignificant proportions, retreated out of sight. “Why do I feel like this?” Celia could still ask herself by daylight, and repeat, “Everything is all right.” But in the night time the power of the thing was complete.
She had at last, after some three days of such nerve-sickness, taken something to assist sleep. But the small hours found her, in spite of all, awake and staring into the dark, with her troubled mind harping upon the same chords. She sat up in bed, old sorrows bleeding afresh with the new; she took her confused head between her hands, and was voicing the unreconcilement of millions before her and to follow: “Why is everything I love made into an instrument to punish me? What have I done? Why all this senseless pain and calamity to me? Why to me one after the other two losses such as, coming singly in a life, would be enough to darken the sun? Are you, stupid blind Fate, weaving a pattern in which the same design must repeat itself? For is it justice that twice I should have the thing my heart had grown around taken from me, and not in the terrible legitimate way of death, but just placed out of reach and sight, while I torture myself with wondering what may be happening to make the beloved suffer?... Oh, Larry, why ... why this dismay inseparable from the thought of you?” The torture of the visions of Larry which, spite of her shuddering repudiation, would obtrude themselves, was such now that even in her morbid mood she recognized something disproportionate in it, and had clear-sightedness to attribute it to a reaction from the narcotic. She tried to get herself more normally awake. She strained her eyes to see the figures upon her watch, and a sort of patience fell upon her, ascertaining that in an hour or so it would begin to be day, by the light of which the worst never appears quite so unendurable. She felt cold now, and drawing up her quilt went through the forlorn mockery of composing herself to sleep.
Perhaps for a moment without knowing it she dozed, for when the barking of Beech, who slept in the laundry, roused her with a start, it was certainly lighter, she could distinguish the vine-branches against her window. The muffled bark of lugubrious timbre came again and again, deadened by distance and doors. The shock of the first outburst—her heart had seemed to roll over—had plunged Celia into what we call, when children suffer it, a fit of the horrors. Twitching, she sat up again, and receiving from Beech’s voice, as his angry barks multiplied, a message of warning, she kept her eyes instinctively fixed upon the square of light.
She slept on the ground-floor, and a garden-walk passed under her window. A figure now darkened it. It could hardly be said that she was frightened, she seemed to have turned to stone. Some one tapped, then stood peering in and making signs. As she did not stir, the tapping was repeated, urgent and more urgent. She arose and with less astonishment than seemed explicable, recognized Judith Bray, who whispered gaspingly, “Let me in, let me in—you must!” At this point was entered by Celia a quite different phase of sensation. Now that there seemed to be something to do, a call upon her for she as yet did not know what, her nerve got back its tensest steadiness, her mind its calm,—she was the effective daughter of a long line of effective people.
She had signed the auroral intruder to a side-entrance, the furthest from the sleepers in the house, and when they had tiptoed back to her own chamber and noiselessly closed its door, she re-entered her bed, being conscious in an undercurrent fashion of cold. As her eyes consulted Judith, the livid atmosphere in which her bad dreams had been enacting themselves through the night was shot with sanguine. Judith’s face prepared the mind for revelations which should smother. That touch of excess which, however expressed, had always been an element in the repugnance with which she inspired Celia, showed itself now in a haggardness beyond all one could conceive a person achieving in the brief space since the girl had been seen at the gate of her garden jesting with the passers. She was bareheaded; the wide hood of a travelling-cape, which had perhaps replaced her hat, lay back, and her blown hair made a great wreath to her bloodless face. Her breathing spoke of a merciless excitement driving her heart.
Celia sat up and clasped her knees with cramped fingers, pale with the gray pallor of the dawn, in which her long coppery hair was just beginning to glimmer a little—with the gilt picture-frames, and the griffins of the candlesticks, and the like. “Well?” she said.