“Rise, poor wounded heart! Beautiful, purified soul, God’s angels rejoice over you! Take your place among the noblest of God’s creatures!”
He raised her as he spoke. All her heart went out to him. She caught his hand—she pressed it to her bosom; she pressed it to her lips—then dropped it suddenly, and stood before him trembling like a frightened child.
“Forgive me!” was all she could say. “I was so lost and lonely—and you are so good to me!”
She tried to leave him. It was useless—her strength was gone; she caught at the head of the couch to support herself. He looked at her. The confession of his love was just rising to his lips—he looked again, and checked it. No, not at that moment; not when she was helpless and ashamed; not when her weakness might make her yield, only to regret it at a later time. The great heart which had spared her and felt for her from the first spared her and felt for her now.
He, too, left her—but not without a word at parting.
“Don’t think of your future life just yet,” he said, gently. “I have something to propose when rest and quiet have restored you.” He opened the nearest door—the door of the dining-room—and went out.
The servants engaged in completing the decoration of the dinner-table noticed, when “Mr. Julian” entered the room, that his eyes were “brighter than ever.” He looked (they remarked) like a man who “expected good news.” They were inclined to suspect—though he was certainly rather young for it—that her ladyship’s nephew was in a fair way of preferment in the Church.
Mercy seated herself on the couch.
There are limits, in the physical organization of man, to the action of pain. When suffering has reached a given point of intensity the nervous sensibility becomes incapable of feeling more. The rule of Nature, in this respect, applies not only to sufferers in the body, but to sufferers in the mind as well. Grief, rage, terror, have also their appointed limits. The moral sensibility, like the nervous sensibility, reaches its period of absolute exhaustion, and feels no more.
The capacity for suffering in Mercy had attained its term. Alone in the library, she could feel the physical relief of repose; she could vaguely recall Julian’s parting words to her, and sadly wonder what they meant—she could do no more.