A Life's Morning eBook

The pale light of dawn began to glimmer through the window-blind.  Emily gave it full admission, and looked out at the morning sky; faintest blue was growing between streaks of cold grey.  Her eyes ached from the fixedness of intense thought; the sweet broad brow was marble, the disorder of her hair spoke of self-abandonment in anguish.  She had no thought of seeking rest; very far from her was sleep and the blessedness of oblivion.  She felt as though sleep would never come again.

But she knew what lay before her; doubt was gone, and there only remained fear to shake her heart.  A day and a night had to be lived through before she could know her fate, so long must she suffer things not to be uttered.  A day and a night, and then, perchance—­nay, certainly—­the vanguard of a vast army of pain-stricken hours.  There was no passion now in her thought of Wilfrid; her love had become the sternness of resolve which dreads itself.  An hour ago her heart had been pierced with self-pity in thinking that she should suffer thus so far away from him, without the possibility of his aid, her suffering undreamt by him.  Now, in her reviving strength, she had something of the martyr’s joy.  If the worst came, if she had spoken to him her last word of tenderness, the more reason that her soul should keep unsullied the image of that bliss which was the crown of life.  His and his only, his in the rapture of ideal love, his whilst her tongue could speak, her heart conceive, his name.

CHAPTER XII

THE FINAL INTERVIEW

On six days of the week, Mrs. Hood, to do her justice, made no show of piety to the powers whose ordering of life her tongue incessantly accused; if her mode of Sabbatical observance was bitter, the explanation was to be sought in the mere force of habit dating from childhood, and had, indeed, a pathetic significance to one sufficiently disengaged from the sphere of her acerbity to be able to judge fairly such manifestations of character.  A rigid veto upon all things secular, a preoccupied severity of visage, a way of speaking which suggested difficult tolerance of injury, an ostentation of discomfort in bodily inactivity—­these were but traditions of happier times; to keep her Sunday thus was to remind herself of days when the outward functions of respectability did in truth correspond to self-respect; and it is probable that often enough, poor woman, the bitterness was not only on her face.  As a young girl in her mother’s home she had learnt that the Christian Sabbath was to be distinguished by absence of joy, and as she sat through these interminable afternoons, on her lap a sour little book which she did not read, the easy-chair abandoned for one which hurt her back, the very cat not allowed to enter the room lest it should gambol, here on the verge of years which touch the head with grey, her life must have seemed to her a weary pilgrimage to a goal of discontent.  How far away was girlish laughter, how far the blossoming of hope which should attain no fruitage, and, alas, how far the warm season of the heart, the woman’s heart that loved and trusted, that joyed in a newborn babe, and thought not of the day when the babe, in growing to womanhood, should have journeyed such lengths upon a road where the mother might not follow.