AN AWAKENING.
When Hermia awoke there was a rattle of wagons in the street, and the
dawn struggled through the curtains. There was a chill in the air and
she shivered a little. She lay recalling the events of the night.
Suddenly she sat upright and cast about her a furtive glance of horror.
Then she sat still and her teeth chattered.
Cryder’s face looked at her from behind every palm! It grinned mockingly
down from every tree! It sprang from the cushions and pressed itself
close to her cheek! The room was _peopled_ with Cryder!
She sprang to her feet and threw her arms above her head. “O God!” she
cried; “it was but for a night! for a night!”
She fled down the room, Cryder, in augmenting swarm, pursuing her. She
flew up the stairs and into her room, and there flung herself on the
floor in such mortal agony as she could never know again, because the
senses must be blunted ever after. Last night, in Quintard’s arms, as
heaven’s lightning flashed through her heart, every avenue in it had
been rent wide. The great mystery of life had poured through, flooding
them with light, throwing into cloudless relief the glorious heights and
the muttering depths. Last night she had dwelt on the heights, and in
that starry ether had given no glance to the yawning pits below. But
sleep had come; she had slid gently, unwittingly down; she had awakened
to find herself writhing on the sharp, jutting rocks of a rayless
cavern, on whose roof of sunset gold she had rambled for days and weeks
with a security which had in it the blindness of infatuation.
She marry Quintard and live with him as the woman he loved and honored
above all women! She try to scale those heights where was to be garnered
something better worth offering her lover than any stores in her own
sterile soul! That hideous, ineffaceable brand seemed scorching her
breast with letters of fire. If she had but half loved Cryder—but she
had not loved him for a moment. With her right hand she had cast the
veil over her eyes; with her left, she had fought away all promptings
that would have rent the veil in twain. Every moment, from beginning to
awakening, she had shut her ears to the voice which would have whispered
that her love was a deliberate delusion, created and developed by her
will. No! she had no excuse. She was a woman of brains; there was no
truth she might not have grasped had she chosen to turn her eyes and
face it.
She flung her arms over her head, grasping the fringes of the rug, and
twisting them into a shapeless mass. She moaned aloud in quick, short,
unconscious throbs of sound. She was five-and-twenty, and life was over.
She had wandered through long years in a wilderness as desolate as
night, and she had reached the gates of the city to find them shut. They
had opened for a moment and she had stood within them; then a hand had
flung her backward, and the great, golden portals had rushed together
with an impetus which welded them for all time. She made no excuses for
herself; she hurled no anathemas against fate. Her intellect had been
given to her to save her from the mistakes of foolish humanity, a lamp
to keep her out of the mud. She had shaded the lamp and gone down into
the mire. She had known by experience and by thought that no act of
man’s life passed without a scar; that the scars knit together and
formed the separate, indestructible constituent fibers of his character.
And each fiber influenced eternally the structure as a whole. She had
known this, and yet, without a glance into the future, without a stray
thought tossed to issues, she had burnt herself as indifferently as a
woman who has nothing to lose. It was true that great atonement was in
her power, that in a life’s reach of love and duty the scar would fade.
But that was not in the question. With such tragic natures there is no
medium. She could not see a year in the future that would not be haunted
with memories and regrets; an hour when that scar would not burn.
If life could not be perfect, she would have nothing less. She had dealt
her cards, she would accept the result. She had had it in her to enjoy a
happiness possible only to women of her intellect and temperament. She
had deliberately put happiness out of her life, and there could be but
one end to the matter.
She sprang to her feet. She had no tears, but it seemed as if something
had its teeth at her vitals and was tearing them as a tiger tears its
victim. She walked aimlessly up and down the room until exhausted, then
went mechanically to bed.
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