As Eden, through thunderclaps, and zig-zagged flames of light, groped
back to consciousness again, it was with the intuition that some
calamity was waiting to greet her. Into the depths of her being, a voice
which refused to be hushed had been whispering, "Come." And Eden,
clinging to the fringes of night, strove to still the call. But the
phantom of things that were persisted and overcame her; it loomed
abruptly, with arms outstretched, forcing her against her will, to
reason with that in which no reason was.
For the moment she was benumbed, out-wearied with effort and enervated
by the strain and depletion of force. She wished herself unconscious
again, and looked back into the absence of sentiency from which she had
issued, as a pilgrim reentering the desert may recall the groves of
Mekka and the silence of the Khabian tomb. It had been less a swoon to
her than a foretaste of peace, the antithesis of life compressed into a
second; and she longed for a repetition of the sudden suffocation of its
embrace. But memory had got its baton back, and the incidents of the
hour trooped before her gaze. She could not be free of them; they beat
at her heart, filling her thoughts to fulfillment itself. In their
onslaught they brought her new strength, the courage that comes to the
oppressed; and rising from the lounge on which she had fallen, she left
her father and his ministrations, and redescended into the past with
anger for aigrette and hatred for spur.
It was the room that she had occupied during her girlhood to which she
then went, and in the presence of the familiar walls, something reminded
her of the days in which she had believed that the ignoble bore a stigma
on their brow, that infamy of thought or deed left a visible sign. She
recalled the old legends with which her childhood had been charmed, the
combats of heroes with monsters, the struggles of lords with lies. In
those days indeed, evil had been to her an abstraction, a figure of
speech beckoned out of the remotest past, and unencounterable as the
giant bat that darkened the nights of prehistoric time. Then had come a
nearer acquaintance with it, the shudders that chronicles brought, and
the intimations of the fabliaux; but still it had been distant, a
belonging of the past incompetent of survival. And it was not until
within recent years that she learned that it had indeed survived. Even
then the tidings that reached her had as much consistency to her mind as
the news of cholera in Singapore. She could not picture that Orient
port, and the cholera she was sure would never attack her in her
father's house.
And now suddenly she was contaminated. She felt as one may feel who had
been lured into a lazar of lepers. Turn which way she might she could
never wash herself clean. She was degraded in her own sight, and tricked
by those whom she had trusted best. And no issue, not one. The dishonor
into which she had been trapped was a thing that clamored for redress,
and to that clamoring of her heart no answer was vouchsafed. "O God,"
she moaned, "is justice dead? Where are the thunderbolts you used to
wield? Have you wearied of vengeance? have you left it, Jehovah, to us?"
Her forehead was throbbing as it had never throbbed before. Above it
each individual hair seemed to be turning red. Her sultry eyes were
dilated; she was quivering from shoulder to heel. And as in her restless
anger she paced the room, before her on the wall glowed the device her
own hands had made--_Keep Yourself Pure_. For a second she stared at it,
the color mounting and retreating from her cheeks, and suddenly she tore
it down and trampled it under foot.
"Vengeance is there," she cried; and without even the hesitation of a
hesitation she bent over a table, and finding a sheet of paper, she
scrawled across it--_In telling you of Maule's love for me I omitted to
tell you of my own for Adrian._ This she addressed and then rang the
bell.
And as she stood waiting for a servant to come, there was a rap on the
door and her father entered. He looked at her for an instant and rubbed
his hands. "It is chilly here, Eden," he said; "had you not better come
down-stairs?"
"Is it worth while? It must be late. Where is Parker? has she not come
with my things?"
"Yes; it is almost six o'clock. Parker--"
"Six! I thought it was midnight. How long have I been here?"
"Three or four minutes at most. I had a note to write. So soon as I
could do so I followed you at once. You are quite yourself again, Eden,
are you not?"
"I can understand," mused Eden, "that there are years that count double
when there are moments that prolong themselves as have these." "Yes,"
she answered, aloud. "I am better. I will come with you."
She picked up the message she had written and left the room. In the
hallway was the servant for whom she had rung. "Take this to Fifth
Avenue," she said. "There is no answer, but see that it is delivered in
person."