Janet lay still, as she had promised; but the tea, which had warmed her
and given her a sense of greater bodily ease, had only heightened the
previous excitement of her brain. Her ideas had a new vividness, which
made her feel as if she had only seen life through a dim haze before; her
thoughts, instead of springing from the action of her own mind, were
external existences, that thrust themselves imperiously upon her like
haunting visions. The future took shape after shape of misery before her,
always ending in her being dragged back again to her old life of terror,
and stupor, and fevered despair. Her husband had so long overshadowed her
life that her imagination could not keep hold of a condition in which
that great dread was absent; and even his absence--what was it? only a
dreary vacant flat, where there was nothing to strive after, nothing to
long for.
At last, the light of morning quenched the rushlight, and Janet’s
thoughts became more and more fragmentary and confused. She was every
moment slipping off the level on which she lay thinking, down, down into
some depth from which she tried to rise again with a start. Slumber was
stealing over her weary brain: that uneasy slumber which is only better
than wretched waking, because the life we seemed to live in it determines
no wretched future, because the things we do and suffer in it are but
hateful shadows, and leave no impress that petrifies into an irrevocable
past.
She had scarcely been asleep an hour when her movements became more
violent, her mutterings more frequent and agitated, till at last she
started up with a smothered cry, and looked wildly round her, shaking
with terror.
‘Don’t be frightened, dear Mrs. Dempster,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, who was up
and dressing, ‘you are with me, your old friend, Mrs. Pettifer. Nothing
will harm you.’
Janet sank back again on her pillow, still trembling. After lying silent
a little while, she said, ‘It was a horrible dream. Dear Mrs. Pettifer,
don’t let any one know I am here. Keep it a secret. If he finds out, he
will come and drag me back again.’
‘No, my dear, depend on me. I’ve just thought I shall send the servant
home on a holiday--I’ve promised her a good while. I’ll send her away as
soon as she’s had her breakfast, and she’ll have no occasion to know
you’re here. There’s no holding servants’ tongues, if you let ’em know
anything. What they don’t know, they won’t tell; you may trust ’em so
far. But shouldn’t you like me to go and fetch your mother?’
‘No, not yet, not yet. I can’t bear to see her yet.’
‘Well, it shall be just as you like. Now try and get to sleep again. I
shall leave you for an hour or two, and send off Phœbe, and then bring
you some breakfast. I’ll lock the door behind me, so that the girl mayn’t
come in by chance.’
The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else.
In the night it presses on our imagination--the forms it takes are false,
fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary
persistence of definite measurable reality. The man who looks with
ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not
half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks
over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine. That moment of
intensest depression was come to Janet, when the daylight which showed
her the walls, and chairs, and tables, and all the commonplace reality
that surrounded her, seemed to lay bare the future too, and bring out
into oppressive distinctness all the details of a weary life to be lived
from day to day, with no hope to strengthen her against that evil habit,
which she loathed in retrospect and yet was powerless to resist. Her
husband would never consent to her living away from him: she was become
necessary to his tyranny; he would never willingly loosen his grasp on
her. She had a vague notion of some protection the law might give her, if
she could prove her life in danger from him; but she shrank utterly, as
she had always done, from any active, public resistance or vengeance: she
felt too crushed, too faulty, too liable to reproach, to have the
courage, even if she had had the wish to put herself openly in the
position of a wronged woman seeking redress. She had no strength to
sustain her in a course of self-defence and independence: there was a
darker shadow over her life than the dread of her husband--it was the
shadow of self-despair. The easiest thing would be to go away and hide
herself from him. But then there was her mother: Robert had all her
little property in his hands, and that little was scarcely enough to keep
her in comfort without his aid. If Janet went away alone he would be sure
to persecute her mother; and if she _did_ go away--what then? She must
work to maintain herself; she must exert herself, weary and hopeless as
she was, to begin life afresh. How hard that seemed to her! Janet’s
nature did not belie her grand face and form: there was energy, there was
strength in it; but it was the strength of the vine, which must have its
broad leaves and rich clusters borne up by a firm stay. And now she had
nothing to rest on--no faith, no love. If her mother had been very
feeble, aged, or sickly, Janet’s deep pity and tenderness might have made
a daughter’s duties an interest and a solace; but Mrs. Raynor had never
needed tendance; she had always been giving help to her daughter; she had
always been a sort of humble ministering spirit; and it was one of
Janet’s pangs of memory, that instead of being her mother’s comfort, she
had been her mother’s trial. Everywhere the same sadness! Her life was a
sun-dried, barren tract, where there was no shadow, and where all the
waters were bitter.
No! She suddenly thought--and the thought was like an electric
shock--there was one spot in her memory which seemed to promise her an
untried spring, where the waters might be sweet. That short interview
with Mr. Tryan had come back upon her--his voice, his words, his look,
which told her that he knew sorrow. His words have implied that he
thought his death was near; yet he had a faith which enabled him to
labour--enabled him to give comfort to others. That look of his came back
on her with a vividness greater than it had had for her in reality:
surely he knew more of the secrets of sorrow than other men; perhaps he
had some message of comfort, different from the feeble words she had been
used to hear from others. She was tired, she was sick of that barren
exhortation--Do right, and keep a clear conscience, and God will reward
you, and your troubles will be easier to bear. She wanted _strength_ to
do right--she wanted something to rely on besides her own resolutions;
for was not the path behind her all strewn with _broken_ resolutions? How
could she trust in new ones? She had often heard Mr. Tryan laughed at for
being fond of great sinners. She began to see a new meaning in those
words; he would perhaps understand her helplessness, her wants. If she
could pour out her heart to him! if she could for the first time in her
life unlock all the chambers of her soul!
The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh
ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to
whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than
mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of
ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and
those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from
the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.
When Mrs. Pettifer came back to her, turning the key and opening the door
very gently, Janet, instead of being asleep, as her good friend had
hoped, was intensely occupied with her new thought. She longed to ask
Mrs. Pettifer if she could see Mr. Tryan; but she was arrested by doubts
and timidity. He might not feel for her--he might be shocked at her
confession--he might talk to her of doctrines she could not understand or
believe. She could not make up her mind yet; but she was too restless
under this mental struggle to remain in bed.
‘Mrs. Pettifer,’ she said, ‘I can’t lie here any longer; I must get up.
Will you lend me some clothes?’
Wrapt in such drapery as Mrs. Pettifer could find for her tall figure,
Janet went down into the little parlour, and tried to take some of the
breakfast her friend had prepared for her. But her effort was not a
successful one; her cup of tea and bit of toast were only half finished.
The leaden weight of discouragement pressed upon her more and more
heavily. The wind had fallen, and a drizzling rain had come on; there was
no prospect from Mrs. Pettifer’s parlour but a blank wall; and as Janet
looked out at the window, the rain and the smoke-blackened bricks seemed
to blend themselves in sickening identity with her desolation of spirit
and the headachy weariness of her body.
Mrs. Pettifer got through her household work as soon as she could, and
sat down with her sewing, hoping that Janet would perhaps be able to talk
a little of what had passed, and find some relief by unbosoming herself
in that way. But Janet could not speak to her; she was importuned with
the longing to see Mr. Tryan, and yet hesitating to express it.
Two hours passed in this way. The rain went on drizzling, and Janet sat
still, leaning her aching head on her hand, and looking alternately at
the fire and out of the window. She felt this could not last--this
motionless, vacant misery. She must determine on something, she must take
some step; and yet everything was so difficult.
It was one o’clock, and Mrs. Pettifer rose from her seat, saying, ‘I must
go and see about dinner.’
The movement and the sound startled Janet from her reverie. It seemed as
if an opportunity were escaping her, and she said hastily, ‘Is Mr. Tryan
in the town to-day, do you think?’
‘No, I should think not, being Saturday, you know,’ said Mrs. Pettifer,
her face lighting up with pleasure; ‘but he _would_ come, if he was sent
for. I can send Jesson’s boy with a note to him any time. Should you like
to see him?’
‘Yes, I think I should.’
‘Then I’ll send for him this instant.’