When she came back she went up to her own room. On opening the door she look round, surprised. Her pictures, that she had left scattered about, on chair and easel, were not visible anywhere.
Her first thought was that the maid, in clearing up the room, had laid them all together, and put them away somewhere. She opened one drawer, and then another, but without finding them.
Then, with a suddenly anxiously beating heart, she looked round the room again. A side-table caught her eye, and on it—what was that strange mass of ragged-edged paper piled there? She crossed to it. Her pictures were there, or the torn fragments of them, destroyed beyond hope of recovery, and on the top of the broken heap lay her Bible.
Bewildered, distracted, hardly realising what had happened, Regina laid the book aside and took up first one mutilated sheet, and then another, scanning them with staring eyes. Each one had been torn across and then across again many times, and roughly, so that the edges were violently jagged.... Nothing of beauty remained, except the wonderful colours; the scraps of softly brilliant tints even in their hopeless destruction had a confused loveliness.
Regina's fingers trembled more and more as she turned them over. All the blood had left her face; it was ashy, convulsed. Who could have done it? It seemed the act of a child or a maniac. Months of patient, untiring work, buoyed up by hopes and anticipation of success and the joy of creation, had been undone in a few moments. When it came home to her that not one of these precious children that she had so loved and rejoiced in, that had been her constant companions and comforters through days and weeks, remained to her, a slow sort of agony took possession of her, that was so intense it seemed it must kill her. Gasping, she sat down on a chair, holding the rim of the table and staring at its contents.
Jane and Violet Marlow were sitting together that afternoon in a small boudoir they shared between them, when suddenly the door was opened, Regina appeared on the threshold, deadly white, and with black and kindling eyes.
"Have you, either of you, been to my room and destroyed my pictures?" she asked. Her tones were like the scrape of steel against iron. Both the girls looked up, one from the novel she was reading, the other from the band of silk she was embroidering. Regina knew in that first second, in that first upward glance of surprise and dismay, that they were not the guilty ones.
"Oh, Regina!" was all they could either find to say, but the accent in it of genuine horror was enough for her quick ears. Both girls knew how Regina loved and valued her paintings, and some dim conception of her suffering came home to them as they looked at her distorted face.
"Someone has," she returned. "Where's mother?"
"In the linen-room," Violet answered, and Regina turned away, closing the door behind her. Her feet hardly touched the ground as she went down to the linen-room. She opened the door and found Mrs. Marlow sitting before the huge linen cupboard, her lap full of damask tablecloths she was sorting.