Part 18 (2/2)
Suddenly, as a shaft of light through parting clouds, came bursting forth, radiant, rejoicing, that sense of power, large, resistless, genial as morning suns.h.i.+ne. Yes, yes, let them say what they might, discourage, smile, or frown as they would, the faculty was given to her, and she would fight for opportunity to use it while she had breath.
CHAPTER XIII.
As if it had all been ingeniously planned, the minutest incidents and conditions of Hadria's life conspired towards the event that was to decide its drift for ever.
Often, in the dim afternoon, she would sit by the window and watch the rain sweeping across the country, longing then for Temperley's music, which used to make the wild scene so unspeakably beautiful. Now there was no music, no music anywhere, only this fierce and mournful rush of the wind, which seemed as if it were trying to utter some universal grief. At sunset, braving the cold, she would mount the creaking staircase, pa.s.s along the silent upper corridors, and on through the empty rooms to the garret in the tower. The solitude was a relief; the strangeness of the scene appealed to some wild instinct, and to the intense melancholy that lurks in the Celtic nature.
Even at night, she did not shrink from braving the glooms and silences of the deserted upper floor, nor the solitude of the garret, which appeared the deeper, from the many memories of happy evenings that it evoked. She wished Ernest would come home. It was so long since she had seen her favourite brother. She could not bear the thought of his drifting away from her. What talks they had had in this old garret!
These nights in the tower, among the winds, soothed the trouble of her spirit as nothing else had power to do. The mystery of life, the thrill of existence, touched her with a strange joy that ran perilously near to pain. What vast dim possibilities lurked out there, in the hollows of the hills! What inspiration thundered in the voice of the prophet wind!
Once, she had gone downstairs and out, alone, in a tearing storm, to wander across the bleak pastures, wrapt round by the wind as by a flame; at one with the desperate elemental thing.
The wanderer felt herself caught into the heart of some vast unknown power, of which the wind was but a thrall, until she became, for a moment, consciously part of that which was universal. Her personality grew dim; she stood, as it seemed, face to face with Nature, divided from the ultimate truth by only a thin veil, to temper the splendour and the terror. Then the tension of personal feeling was loosened. She saw how entirely vain and futile were the things of life that we grieve and struggle over.
It was not a side, an aspect of existence, but the whole of it that seemed to storm round her, in the darkness. No wonder, when the wind was let loose among the mountains, that the old Highland people thought that their dead were about them. All night long, after Hadria returned to her room in the keep, the wind kept up its cannonade against the walls, hooting in the chimneys with derisive voices, and flinging itself, in mad revolt, against the old-established hills and the stable earth, which changed its forms only in slow obedience to the persuadings of the elements, in the pa.s.sing of centuries. It cared nothing for the pa.s.sion of a single storm.
And then came reaction, doubt. After all, humanity was a puny production of the Ages. Men and women were like the struggling animalculae that her father had so often shewn the boys, in a drop of magnified ditch-water; yet not quite like those microscopic insects, for the stupendous processes of life had at last created a widening consciousness, a mind which could perceive the bewildering vastness of Nature and its own smallness, which could, in some measure, get outside its own particular ditch, and the strife and struggle of it, groping upwards for larger realities--
”Over us stars and under us graves.”
To go down next morning to breakfast; to meet the usual homely events, was bewildering after such a night. Which was dream: this or that? So solid and convincing seemed, at times, the interests and objects of every day, that Hadria would veer round to a sudden conviction that these things, or what they symbolized, were indeed the solid facts of human life, and that all other impressions arose from the disorderly working of overcharged brain-cells. It was a little ailment of youth and would pa.s.s off. Had it been possible to describe to her father the impressions made upon her by the world and Nature, as they had presented themselves to her imagination from her childhood, he would have prescribed change of air and gymnastics. Perhaps that was the really rational view of the matter. But what if these hygienic measures cured her of the haunting consciousness of mystery and vastness; what if she became convinced of the essential importance of the Gordon pedigree, or of the amount of social consideration due to the family who had taken Clarenoc? Would that alter the bewildering truths of which she would have ceased to think?
No; it would only mean that the animalcule had returned to the occupations of its ditch, while the worlds and the peoples went spinning to their destiny.
”Do the duty that lies nearest thee,” counselled everybody: people of all kinds, books of all kinds. ”Cheap, well-sounding advice,” thought Hadria, ”sure of popularity! Continue to wriggle industriously, O animalcule, in that particular ditch wherein it has pleased heaven to place thee; seek not the flowing stream and the salt ocean; and if, some clear night, a star finds room to mirror itself in thy little stagnant world, s.h.i.+ning through the fat weeds and slime that almost shut out the heavens, pray be careful not to pay too much heed to the high-born luminary. Look to your wriggling; that is your proper business. An animalcule that does not wriggle must be morbid or peculiar. All will tender, in different forms of varying elegance, the safe and simple admonition: 'Wriggle and be d.a.m.ned to you!'”
It was at this somewhat fevered moment, that Hubert Temperley appeared, once more, upon the scene. Hadria was with her mother, taking tea at Drumgarren, when Mrs. Gordon, catching the sounds of carriage wheels, announced that she was expecting Hubert and his sister for a visit. In another second, the travellers were in the drawing-room.
Hubert's self-possession was equal to the occasion. He introduced his sister to Mrs. Fullerton and Hadria. Miss Temperley was his junior by a year; a slight, neatly-built young woman, with a sort of tact that went on brilliantly up to a certain point, and then suddenly collapsed altogether. She had her brother's self-complacency, and an air of encouragement which Mrs. Gordon seemed to find most gratifying.
She dressed perfectly, in quiet Parisian fas.h.i.+on. Hadria saw that her brother had taken her into his confidence, or she concluded so from something in Miss Temperley's manner. The latter treated Hadria with a certain familiarity, as if she had known her for some time, and she had a way of seeming to take her apart, when addressing her, as if there were a sort of understanding between them. It was here that her instinct failed her; for she seemed unaware that this a.s.sumption of an intimacy that did not exist was liable to be resented, and that it might be unpleasant to be expected to catch special remarks sent over the heads of the others, although ostensibly for the common weal.
Hadria thought that she had never seen so strange a contrast as this young woman's behaviour, within and without the circle of her perceptions. It was the more remarkable, since her mind was bent upon the details and niceties of conduct, and the _nuances_ of existence.
”I shall come and see you as soon as I can,” she promised, when Mrs.
Fullerton rose to leave.
Miss Temperley kept her word. She was charmed with the old house, praising authoritatively.
”This is an excellent piece of carving; far superior to the one in the dining-room. Ah, yes, that is charming; so well arranged. You ought to have a touch of blue there to make it perfect.”
Hubert shewed good taste in keeping away from Dunaghee, except to pay his call on Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton.
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