When the carriage at last arrived for them, looming up out of the fog
like a great floating skull, it was full Night, and the shadows had
again grown long across the young girl's heart.
Walking beside her like a wraith in the gloom, explaining to her the
`details' which she withheld from Michael, Anne Scott had seemed less
and less a loving guardian, more and more the whispering narrator of
the black comedy into which she had so suddenly returned, after a
brief and unreal respite of light and hope.
But of all the things the woman said, only one would take solid hold
in her mind, dimming and obscuring all others like the wreathing mists
that had engulfed her fated cousin upon the margins of Death's
Kingdom:
Her mother, who in her short-lived happiness she had all but
forgotten, had joined him there. She was dead.
Dead.
Her mother, who had suffered so much, whom she had promised both in
thought and word to restore, if not avenge..... Gone forever. Small
voices, peeping like crickets in the dark silent halls of Damnation,
told her she had done everything she could, and must now surrender her
to memory.
"Would have told Anne this evening. . .before she set out for the
Talberts. . .from there to send a doctor." All useless now, swept
away, as the Lord Purceville had swept away her mother's love, and
then her life.
And now, just as surely, she herself was being drawn into the heart of
that great spider's web, to be sucked dry and then discarded. She
remembered her mother's words: the man you most want to love, but in
the end must despise more than any.
Her spirit palled as the door of the plush carriage, like the padded
lid of a casket, sealed them in. Fear and cold and grief at last
overcame her, as she sloughed in near unconsciousness against the
known and unknown woman beside her.
But a moment before all was consumed in the black sleep of despair, a
tiny figure stood at the heart of the abyss and whispered a single,
heart-breaking word.
The figure was herself, and the word:
"Michael."