Part 17 (1/2)

Her lover and her husband seemed to have conspired together to revenge themselves upon her.

Fay leaned her pretty head against the window-sill and sobbed convulsively.

Poor little soul in prison, weeping behind the bars of her cell, that only her own hands could open!

Were not Fay and Michael both prisoners, fast bound: she in misery, he only in iron.

The door opened gently and Magdalen came in in a long white wrapper, with a candle in her hand.

She put down the candle and came towards Fay. She did not speak. Her face quivered a little. She bent over the huddled figure in the window seat, and with a great tenderness drew it into her arms. For a moment Fay yielded to the comfort of the close encircling arms, and leaned her head against Magdalen's breast.

Then she wrenched herself free, and pushed her sister violently from her.

”Why do you come creeping in like that?” she said fiercely. ”You only come to spy upon me.”

Magdalen did not speak. She had withdrawn a pace, and stood looking at her sister, her face as white as her night-gown.

Fay turned her tear-drenched face to the window and looked fixedly out.

There was a faint movement in the room. When she looked round Magdalen was gone.

Fay, worn with two years of partially eluded suffering, restless with pain, often sick at heart, was at last nearing the last ditch:--but she had not reached it yet.

Many more useless tears, many more nights of anguish, many more days of sullen despair still lay between her and that last refuge.

CHAPTER XIII

Il n'y a point de pa.s.se vide ou pauvre, il n'y a point d'evenements miserables, il n'y a que des evenements miserablement accueillis.--MAETERLINCK.

Magdalen went back to her own room, and set down her candle on the dressing-table with a hand that trembled a little.

”I ought not to have gone,” she said half aloud, ”and yet--I knew she was awake and in trouble. And she nearly spoke to me to-day. I thought--perhaps at last--the time had come like it did with Mother. But I was wrong. I ought not to have gone.”

The large room which had been her mother's, the elder Fay's, seemed to-night crowded with ghostly memories: awakened by the thought of the younger Fay sobbing in the room at the end of the pa.s.sage.

In this room, in that bed, the elder Fay had died eighteen years ago.

How like the mother the child had become who had been named after her.

Magdalen saw again in memory the poor pretty apathetic mother who had taken so long to die; a grey-haired Fay, timid as the present Fay, unwise, inconsequent, blind as Fay, feebly unselfish, as alas! Fay was not.

There is in human nature a forlorn impulse, to which Mrs. Bellairs had yielded, to speak at last when the great silence draws near, of the things that have long cankered the heart, to lay upon others part of the unbearable burden of life just when death is about to remove move it. Mrs. Bellairs had always groped feebly in heavy manacles through life, in a sort of twilight, but her approaching freedom seemed towards the last to throw a light, faint and intermittent but still a light, on much that had lain confused and inexplicable in her mind. Many whispered confidences were poured into Magdalen's ears during those last weeks, faltered disjointed revelations, which cut deep into the sensitive stricken heart of the young girl, cutting possibly also new channels for all her after life to flow through.

Did the mother realise the needless anguish she inflicted on the spirit of the grave, silent girl of seventeen. Perhaps she was too near the great change to judge any longer--not that she had ever judged--what was wise or unwise, what was large or small. Trivial poisoned incidents and the deep wounds of life, petty unreasonable annoyances and acute memories were all jumbled together. She had never sorted them, and now she had ceased to know which was which. The feeble departing spirit wandered aimlessly among them.