I AM TORTURED BY MYSELF AND OTHERS
In some manner I controlled myself, and in the confusion which followed Lucy's wild cry I opened the door beside me and stepped noiselessly into the adjoining room.
I sank down into a chair, benumbed in body and bewildered in mind. Everything was in a whirl of confusion, and through it I heard the heart-breaking cry that was no hallucination of madness, no fancy of a disordered mind, but an arraignment straight from the heart of a woman who perhaps had suffered beyond what I was suffering now.
What was happening behind those closed doors? Once the mad impulse flashed across me to enter and learn the worst, but I shrank appalled at the thought of exposing myself to further humiliation. In my seeking for some escape, I even questioned if I had heard aright; it seemed impossible that there should not be some explanation, that there was not some horrible mistake, and a fierce anger swept over me at the injustice of it all.
Had I wasted the love of my youth—the love of my life—on a man whom I had endowed with every noble quality of which I could conceive to find that he was only of the same common clay as others whose advances I had ignored because I had set him so high?
In my anger I put him beneath all others, because, as a silly girl, I had been blinded by my own delusions, and, as a foolish woman, I had gone on dreaming the dreams of a girl. The thought, too, of Lucy having been so close to me all these months, and of how nearly I had confided in her, stung me like a blow.
And this was the end! I had wasted every affection of my nature in blind worship of the idol which now lay shattered at the first blow. I had wandered with reckless feet far from the path in which all prudent women tread, to find myself in a wilderness alone and without a refuge. My secret was in the keeping of Sarennes, who would sooner or later betray it, when he thought by so doing he could bend me to his will.
Why had I never looked at this with the same eyes, the same brain I had used in other matters? In other matters I had conducted myself as a reasonable woman should; but in this, the weightiest affair in my life, had I wandered, without sane thought, without any guide save impulses so unreasoning that they could scarce have even swayed my judgment in other things.
Then, my anger having passed, I saw the whole incredible folly of my life, and alone and in bitter misery I trod the Valley of Humiliation, until with wearied soul and softened heart I knelt and prayed for deliverance.
When I returned to the house the effort to meet and talk with others did much to restore me to myself. Angélique, I could see, was greatly excited, and it was a pain to think that what to me was a bitter degradation and the wreck of all my hopes could possibly be looked upon by a young and innocent girl as a piece of curious surmisal, perhaps to be laughed over and speculated upon, without a thought of the misery it entailed.