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Page 75
The window was open just wide enough for the proper ventilation of the
room. For a long time she sat thus without moving, only from time to
time smoothing back the heavy, bronze-red hair from her temples and
ears. By degrees the thinking faculties of her brain, as it were, a
myriad of delicate interlacing wheels, slowly decreased in the rapidity
and intensity of their functions. She began to feel instead of to think.
As the activity of her mind lapsed to a certain pleasant numbness, a
vague, formless, nameless emotion seemed to be welling to the surface.
It was no longer a question of the brain. What then? Was it the heart?
She gave no name to this new emotion; it was too confused as yet, too
undefinable. A certain great sweetness seemed to be coming upon her, but
she could not say whether she was infinitely sad or supremely happy; a
smile was on her lips, and yet the tears began to brim in her dull-blue
eyes.
She felt as if some long, fierce struggle, or series of struggles, were
at last accomplished; as if for a long period of time she had been
involved in the maze and tortuous passages of some gloomy cavern, but at
length, thence issuing, had again beheld the stars. A great tenderness,
a certain tremulous joy in all things that were true and good and right,
grew big and strong within her; the delight in living returned to her.
The dawn was brightening and flushing over all the world, and colour,
light, and warmth were coming back into her life. The night had been
still and mild, but now the first breath of the morning breeze stirred
in the trees, in the grass, in the flowers, and the thick, dew-drenched
bushes along the roadside, and a delicious aroma of fields and woods and
gardens came to her. The sweetness of life and the sweetness of those
things better than life and more enduring, the things that do not fail,
nor cease, nor vanish away, suddenly entered into that room and
descended upon her almost in the sense of a benediction, a visitation,
something mystic and miraculous. It was a moment to hope all things, to
believe all things, to endure all things.
She caught her breath, listening--for what she did not know. Once again,
just as it had been in that other dawn, in that other room where the
Enemy had been conquered, the sense of some great happiness was in the
air, was coming to her swiftly. But now the greater Enemy had been
outfought, the morning of a greater day was breaking and spreading, and
the greatest happiness in the world was preparing for her. How it had
happened she did not know. Now was not the moment to think, to reason,
to reflect. It seemed as though the rushing of wings was all about her,
as though a light brighter than the day was just about to break upon her
sight, as though a music divinely beautiful was just about to burst upon
her ear. But the light was not for her eye; the music was not for her
ear. The radiance and the harmony came from herself, from within her.
The intellect was numb. Only the heart was alive on this wonderful
midsummer's morning, and it was in her heart that the radiance shone and
the harmony vibrated. Back in his place once more, high on his throne,
the love that she believed had forever departed from her sat exalted and
triumphant, singing to the cadence of that unheard music, shining and
magnificent in the glory of that new-dawned light.
Would Bennett live? Suddenly that question leaped up in her mind and
stood in the eye of her imagination, terrible, menacing--a hideous, grim
spectre, before which Lloyd quailed with failing heart and breath. The
light, the almost divine radiance that had burst upon her, nevertheless
threw a dreadful shadow before it. Beneath the music she heard the growl
of the thunder. Her new-found happiness was not without its accompanying
dismay. Love had not returned to her heart alone. With it had returned
the old Enemy she had once believed had left her forever. Now it had
come back. As before, it lurked and leered at her from dark corners. It
crept to her side, to her back, ready to leap, ready to strike, to
clutch at her throat with cold fingers and bear her to the earth,
rending her heart with a grief she told herself she could not endure and
live. She loved him now with all her mind and might; how could it ever
have been otherwise? He belonged to her--and she? Why, she only lived
with his life; she seemed so bound to him as to be part of his very
self. Literally, she could not understand how it would be possible for
her to live if he should die. It seemed to her that with his death some
mysterious element of her life, something vital and fundamental, for
which there was no name, would disintegrate upon the instant and leave
her without the strength necessary for further existence. But this
would, however, be a relief. The prospect of the years after his death,
the fearful loneliness of life without him, was a horror before which
she veritably believed her reason itself must collapse.
"Lloyd."
Bennett was awake again and watching her with feverish anxiety from
where he lay among the pillows. "Lloyd," he repeated, the voice once so
deep and powerful quavering pitifully. "I was wrong. I don't want you to
go. Don't leave me."
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