CHAPTER XXXVI

One day, some three weeks after Arthur had gone, Angela strolled down the tunnel walk, now, in the height of summer, almost dark with the shade of the lime-trees, and settled herself on one of the stone seats under Caresfoot’s staff.

She had a book in hand, but it soon became clear that she had come to this secluded spot to think rather than read, for it fell unopened from her hand, and her grey eyes were full of a far-off look as they gazed across the lake glittering in the sunlight, away towards the hazy purple outline of the distant hills.  Her face was quite calm, but it was not that of a happy person; indeed, it gave a distinct idea of mental suffering.  All grief, however acute, is subject to fixed gradations, and Angela was yet in the second stage.  First there is the acute stage, when the heart aches with a physical pain, and the mind, filled with a wild yearning or tortured by an unceasing anxiety, well-nigh gives beneath the abnormal strain.  This does not last long, or it would kill or drive us to the mad-house.  Then comes that long epoch of dull misery, enduring till at last kindly nature in pity rubs off the rough extremes of our calamity, and by slow but sure degrees softens agony into sorrow.

This was what she was now passing through, and—­as all highly organized natures like her own are, especially in youth, very sensitive to those more exquisite vibrations of pain and happiness that leave minds of a coarser fibre comparatively unmoved—­it may be taken for granted that she was suffering sufficiently acutely.

Perhaps she had never quite realized how necessary Arthur had become to her, how deep his love had sent its fibres into her heart and inner self, until he was violently wrenched away from her and she lost all sight and knowledge of him in the darkness of the outside world.  Still she had made no show of her sorrow; but once, when Pigott told her some pathetic story of the death of a little child in the village, she burst into a paroxysm of weeping.  The pity for another’s pain had loosed the flood-gates of her own, but it was a performance that she did not repeat.

But Angela had her anxieties as well as her griefs, and it was over these former that she was thinking as she sat on the great stone under the oak.  Love is a wonderful quickener of the perceptions, and, ignorant as she was of all the world’s ways, the more she thought over the terms imposed by her father upon her engagement, the more distrustful did she grow.  Lady Bellamy, too, had been to see her twice, and on each occasion had inspired her with a lively sense of fear and repugnance.  During the first of these visits she had shown a perfect acquaintance with the circumstances of her engagement, her “flirtation with Mr. Heigham,” as she was pleased to call it.  During the second call, too, she had been full of strange remarks about her cousin George, talking mysteriously of “a change” that had come over him since his illness, and of his being under a “new influence.”  Nor was this all; for, on the very next day when she was out walking with Pigott in the village, she had met George himself, and he had insisted upon entering into a long rambling conversation with her, and on looking at her in a way that made her feel perfectly sick.