“Let me think,” she said in a low voice.
She sat down on a couch, baffled. If she looked up, she met the man's burning eyes fixed upon her, and the depths of her being were stirred. If she looked away, her life seemed fragmentary chaos, unrealisable, incomprehensible. She breathed fast from a heaving bosom. Roderick's mystery hovered between the grotesque and the tragic. To run away clandestinely with the man to whom she was to have been married with all the pomp of publicity on the morrow was an idea of comic opera. On the other hand, the blind trust required raised the proceeding to the heroic plane. Again, Nature within her shrank from mystery; she was a child appalled by the dark, and fear was upon her. But the sensitive gentlewoman felt the appeal to honour in every fibre of her pride. Generosity swelled against doubt. A strange physical coldness enwrapped her. To start to-night, with Roderick, surrendering herself utterly; the maiden in her piteously sought refuge from the thought. She glanced tremulously up at him, and her face flamed pink, and warmth entered her heart. She covered her cheeks with her hands and shrank into the corner of the couch.
“Oh, could I not join you afterwards?” she moaned. He fell at her feet and clasped her knees, broke into impassioned pleading. It was a matter of life or death. His unbalanced artistic temperament burst all restraints of conventional forms of speech. He raved of his consuming need. He was less a man than a shaking passion.
The eternal mystery to woman is man's desire of her. It transcends her thought, it looms immense, inscrutable, and irresistible before her. She is the everlasting Semele beneath the fiery glory of Zeus. It is decreed that when brought face to face with it (a chord within her being responsive, be it understood), she shall lose all sense of the proportion between it and the infinite passions of the universe. Life resolves itself into an amazement that she, with a whisper, a touch of her hand, can raise a man from hell to heaven. In the piteous, glorious, tragi-comedy of life, which has been played on millions of stages for millions of years, this elemental fact is so commonplace that it escapes our notice. We are apt to judge from externals, from the results of adherence to ethical systems, from social conventions; and when the actions of men and women are not provided for in artificial canons, we are baffled or are shocked by a sense of the immoral, the abnormal, or the preposterous. But men will desire and women will yield till the end of the human race.
And Ella yielded. She bound herself to meet him that evening and go with him into the darkness, whithersoever he should lead; and Roderick left the house, holding his head high, exultant in the sense of having conquered destiny.
But when he had gone, Ella threw herself face downwards on the couch in all the abandonment of exhaustion. For a while she could not think; she could only be conscious of the flow and ebb, and again the flow and ebb, and once more the flow of emotion, during the past hour. She had entered the room in light-hearted happiness; there had come the shock of an awful dismay. Then she had been lifted in the tide of the man's passion; there had followed the cold numbness of doubt; again passion had swept away reason. Now was reaction. She felt physically prostrated, and her body ached as if it had been beaten. Her eyelids burned. She would have liked to cry miserably, but she could not. She suffered the woman's torment of unshed tears. Suddenly she rose and drew herself together, despising her weakness. She had pledged herself to do a certain thing. It was to be done, and practical commonplaces had to be faced. First was the breaking of the news to Lady Milmo. The girl's heart was smitten with pity for the kindly lady who had entered so wholeheartedly into these wedding preparations. It would be a keen disappointment to countermand the feast, put off the guests, make lame excuses. And that would not be the end. There would be the scandal of her flight, of which Lady Milmo would have to bear the brunt. It was cruel to treat her so. She went to the window and looked out at the sunny houses on the other side of Pont Street; wondered whether they all were cages for women bound as she was in invisible chains. Her course had been marked out with scrupulous exactness; to deviate from it a hair's breadth would be not only breaking a solemn pledge, but perhaps endangering the life or honour, she knew not how, of the man she was to marry. Yet her frank soul rebelled against the deception. The hour of Roderick's departure was to be kept secret; her elopement with him not to be whispered of. She was to give out a journey to Ayresford, to escape from the painful associations of the house in Pont Street, filled with all the vain preparations for the morrow. She had never lied barefacedly in her life, and for a moment she hated Roderick for compelling her to falseness. But then the lingering echoes of his voice hummed in her ears, and the blood rushed back into her cheeks, and she felt strong for the sacrifice of her honour.
Did she love him? She answered the self-put question with a passionate affirmative. Else why was she doing this preposterous thing? Was not the blindness of her trust the very banner of her love? A phrase of Roderick's crossed her mind. “Life is merely the summation of moments of keen living.” She caught at it as a plank with the drowning man's thrill. She was living keenly; that alone was sufficient to justify everything. She was defying the set uses of the tame world. “Each man must batter down for himself the doors that hide life's inner glory” was another of his sayings. Was she not even now battering at the door? Her soul clutched at every supporting straw. Yet, in spite of these aphoristic comforts, it was with a strange, dull sense of fatality that she saw herself sitting by Roderick's side in the train that night, being carried away further and further into the inscrutable darkness.
The first part of her task was over. She had told Lady Milmo. It had been an interview of pain and self-reproach. Lady Milmo had gasped, wept, waxed indignant. All her kindly woman's motherliness had poured itself out upon the girl, whom she considered infamously treated. It was in vain for Ella to plead the matter of life and death that called Roderick away. Lady Milmo had her prejudices. She had cordially approved of Ella's immediate retirement to Ayresford. How could the poor child stay in the house where every surrounding would be a pain to her? She had sent Ella off to lie down in peace upon her own bed, away from the half-packed litter of finery in the girl's room; and while Ella lay there with a splitting headache, helplessly counting the slow hours, Lady Milmo sat heroically before her writing-table immersed in lists and telegraph forms.
The slow hours passed. A little difficulty arose. Lady Milmo had taken it for granted that Ella's maid would accompany her to Ayresford. Ella, alarmed, announced her intention of leaving her behind. She did not even wish her to come to the station to see after the luggage. She had to insist that solitude was essential. Lady Milmo yielded the point reluctantly. At last the time came. Ella's luggage had been placed on the fourwheeled cab. The door was open; the white-capped maid stood on the pavement. Ella turned with a sudden rush of emotion and kissed Lady Milmo, who had come with her to the hall.