"Enid, take what is left to you. Put your arms round her, and hold her against your heart. Hold her safe, and hold her close—for you are holding all the world."
Then, in great agitation, she walked up and down the room; and when she stopped, and stood by Enid's chair, her eyes were streaming.
"Never mind, my darling." An extraordinary exaltation sounded in her voice; and, as she struggled to moderate its tone, there came a queer vibration and huskiness. It seemed that but for dread of waking the little girl, she would have shouted her words. "Never mind. You have your child. Think of that. Nothing else matters. I have suffered; you have suffered—never mind. Perhaps we women were intended to suffer—and we have to bear some things so cruel that they must be borne in silence. If we spoke of them, they might kill. But it is all nothing compared with this;" and she stooped to kiss Enid's forehead, and very gently and softly stroked the child's hair. "You and I have both made our link in the wonderful chain of life. We have given what God gave us. We carried the torch, and it has not been struck out of our hands and extinguished.... We will rear your child; and I shall see you in her; and she will grow tall and strong; and she will love—you most—the mother,—but me too, when she understands that you came to her from me.... And the sun shall shine again, and you shall be happy again—for God is kind, and God is just.... And then there will be no more tears—and a touch of your child's lips will destroy the memory of tears."
XXV
Another year had slowly dragged by.
Enid was still living with her child at the farmhouse; but all the personal property of the child's father, all those numerous signs of too engrossing amusements, had disappeared. Horses and grooms, brushes and boots, spurs and bridles—all were gone. In the suit of Bulford vs. Bulford and Kenion, the petitioner obtained a decree nisi; and soon the decree will be made absolute. Another undefended suit—that of Kenion vs. Kenion—is down for hearing. Very soon now Enid will be free.
Meanwhile the big looking-glasses on the stairs and at department entrances of Thompson & Marsden's shop had been growing tarnished, dull, and spotted. They showed nothing new in their misty depths—emptiness and desolation; unused space so great that it was not necessary to multiply it by reflection; and a grey-haired black-robed woman passing and repassing through the faint bluish fog, with shadowy, ghostly lines of such sad figures marching and wheeling at her side.
But there was no space for fog in the establishment across the road. During these twelve slow months the visible, unmistakable prosperity of Bence had been stupendous.