CHAPTER XVI

RENUNCIATION

When Emily returned from the wastes of ravaged mind, and while yet the images of memory were hardly distinguished from the ghosts of delirious dream, the picture that haunted her with most persistency, with an objective reality the more impressive the clearer her thought became, was one which she could least comprehend or account for.  She saw lying before her a closely muffled form, the outline seeming to declare it that of a man.  The struggle of new-born consciousness was to associate such a vision with the events which had preceded her illness.  Perchance for a day, perchance only for an hour, however long the unmeasured transition from darkness to the dawn of self-knowledge, she suffered the oppression of this mechanical questioning.  At length the presence of her mother by the bedside became a fact, and it led on to the thought of her father.  Her eyes moved in search for him.

The act of speech, in health a mere emphasis of thought, was only to be attained by repetition of efforts; several times she believed herself to have spoken whilst silence still pressed her lips.  Only when the recollection of her last waking day was complete, and when the absence of her father from the room linked itself to memory of her anguished waiting for him, did she succeed in uttering the words which represented her fear.  Her mother was bending over her, aware of the new light in her questioning eyes.

‘Where’s father?’ Emily asked.

‘You shall see him, dear,’ was the reply.  ‘Don’t speak.’

‘He came home?’

‘Yes, he came home.’

Emily fell back into thought; this great fear allayed, the only now, like an angel coming from afar over dark waters, past continued to rebuild itself within her mind.  And now, there gleamed the image of her love.  It had been expelled from memory by the all-possessing woe of those last hours; it returned like a soothing warmth, an assuagement of pain.  As though soul-easing music sounded about her, she again lost her hold on outward things and sank into a natural sleep.

Mrs. Hood feared the next waking.  The question about her father, she attributed to Emily’s incomplete command of her faculties, for she had not doubted that the muffled figure on the couch had been consciously seen by the girl and understood.  Yet with waking the error prolonged itself; it became evident at length that Emily knew nothing of her coming down to the sitting-room, and still had to learn that her father no longer lived.  It was a new suffering under which the poor woman gave way.  Already her natural affliction was complicated with a sense of painful mysteries; in her delirium, Emily had uttered words which there was no explaining, but which proved that there had been some hidden connection between her mental trouble and her father’s failure to return at the usual hour.  Dagworthy’s name