But at the hour she considered suitable Deirdre rose again from her bed.
She could not rest there, although she lay with the endless patience of
a cat, staring hour after hour into the gloom and seeing in it more of
radiance than the sun could show.
She was living at last.
The sense that all the morrows were provided for, and that all the
minutes of all the morrows were calculated and ordained, dropped from
her for ever, for she had become at last an identity instead of a
puppet to be pulled here and ordered there, and to do only what was
willed by other people; for first the imagination awakes, and then the
senses, and lastly the will, when the urge of life is focussed.
Thinking of these other people, of Lavarcham and the grisly servants,
of the ramshackle, sneezing guards, all ringing her about from
freedom, a sense of rage came into her soul, so that at moments she
was no longer a girl but a wild cat, and she could have scratched and
screeched and died in one senseless outrage.
Her mind, too, was overflowing with that same sense of urgency, as
though something clamoured to be done immediately and at a pace faster
than limbs could manage. What was it she wanted? She did not know, but
she knew definitely that she wanted it with a whole uncontrollable
mental greed that made of her a person she did not recognize and could
not battle with.
But with all that tumult of mind she was patient with the marvellous
patience of youth, for no grown person has one tithe of the patience of
a child, who, from the hour he is born until the day when he snatches
liberty from reluctant elders, leads a life that is one unending lesson
in attending. They can wait, for they know that the future is theirs
and will come to them over whatever obstruction. And she could wait.
When Lavarcham trod softly in her chamber she pretended to be asleep,
and amused herself staring behind closed lids at the red light which
the torch carried even through that darkness. She thought her guardian
would never go away, and lifting one scrap of an eyelash she saw
Lavarcham brooding upon her with such a fixity of attention, with so
profound a scrutiny, as surprised her. So curious and prolonged was
this examination that she almost opened her eyes to demand a reason
for this scrutiny from the face of ivory and jet that was bending over
hers. But she did not do so, for young people can bear starings and
examinations which would madden them later in life, and are able to
consider that affairs which actually circle upon them are yet not their
business.
Lavarcham sighed deeply, and as in a passion of what?--fear, hope,
doubt--and then the light began to recede, and went farther away, and
disappeared.
Deirdre knew every motion that Lavarcham made at night. Now she did
this, next she would do that, afterwards she would do such another
thing: an unvarying sequence of small details which she had watched or
listened to since the first hour that she was able to watch or listen.
So that when she came from her bed she left it with the certainty that
she might do so, and that all the habitual details had culminated in
the habitual sleep into which Lavarcham placed herself even when it did
not overcome her.