Each time that she rose, she looked from the semi-darkness towards the brilliant light of the chancel—at the white surplices and the shining faces of the choir, the golden tubes of the organ, and the soft radiance that flashed from the brass of the altar rails. But all the while, whether she sat down or stood up, her thoughts were struggling in darkness and vainly seeking for the faintest glimmer of light.
She thought of her husband and of the shop. He was holding her, would hold her as a tied and gagged prisoner surrounded with the dark chaos that he had caused. How could she save herself—or him? He concealed facts from her; he told her lies; he never let her hear of a difficulty until it was too late to find any means of escape.
And she thought of the destruction of her whole lifework. She saw it certainly approaching—the only possible end to such a partnership. All that she had laboriously constructed was to be stupidly beaten down.
The splendid old business would infallibly be ruined. No business, however firmly established, can withstand the double attack of gross mismanagement and reckless depletion of its funds. As she thought of it, those words of her inveterately active rival echoed and re-echoed. A leak, and no chance of stopping the leak—disaster foreseen, but not to be averted. The leak was too great. All hands at the pumps would not save the ship.
A new and if possible more poignant bitterness filled her mind. It was another long-drawn agony that lay before her; and it seemed to her, looking back at the older pain, that this was almost worse. Confusion, entanglement, darkness—no light, no hope, no chance of opening the track that leads from chaos to security. Bitter, oh, most bitter—to taste the failure one has not deserved, to work wisely and be frustrated by folly, to watch passively while all that one has created and believed to be permanent is slowly demolished and obliterated.
Quite automatically, she had stood up again, and was looking towards the brightly illuminated choir. They were singing the appointed psalms now; and, as half consciously she listened to each chanted verse, the words wove themselves into the burden of her thoughts....
... "They have compassed me about also
... and fought against me without cause."
Altogether without cause. There was the pity of it. If only he would curb his insensate greed, put some check or limit to his excesses, the business would soon recover from the shaking he had given it; and then there would be enough to maintain him in idleness for the rest of his days. She would work for him, if he would but let her.
... "For the love that I had unto them, lo, they take now my contrary part."