Part 35 (2/2)

Juliet rose on her elbow.

”But I am disgraced!” she said, almost indignantly. ”It would be disgrace to him to take me again! I remember one of the officers'

wives----. No, no! he hates and despises me. Besides I could never look one of his friends in the face again. Every body will say I ran away with some one--or that he sent me away because I was wicked. You all had a prejudice against me from the very first.”

”Yes, in a way,” confessed Dorothy. ”It always seemed as if we did not know you and could not get at you, as if you avoided us--with your heart, I mean;--as if you had resolved we should not know you--as if you had something you were afraid we should discover.”

”Ah, there it was, you see!” cried Juliet. ”And now the hidden thing is revealed! That was it: I never could get rid of the secret that was gnawing at my life. Even when I was hardly aware of it, it was there.

Oh, if I had only been ugly, then Paul would never have thought of me!”

She threw herself down again and buried her face.

”Hide me; hide me,” she went on, lifting to Dorothy her hands clasped in an agony, while her face continued turned from her. ”Let me stay here.

Let me die in peace. n.o.body would ever think I was here.”

”That is just what has been coming and going in my mind,” answered Dorothy. ”It is a strange old place: you might be here for months and n.o.body know.”

”Oh! wouldn't you mind it? I shouldn't live long. I couldn't, you know!”

”I will be your very sister, if you will let me,” replied Dorothy; ”only then you must do what I tell you--and begin at once by promising not to leave the house till I come back to you.”

As she spoke she rose.

”But some one will come,” said Juliet, half-rising, as if she would run after her.

”No one will. But if any one should--come here, I will show you a place where n.o.body would find you.”

She helped her to rise, and led her from the room to a door in a rather dark pa.s.sage. This she opened, and, striking a light, showed an ordinary closet, with pegs for hanging garments upon. The sides of it were paneled, and in one of them, not readily distinguishable, was another door. It opened into a room lighted only by a little window high up in a wall, through whose dusty, cobwebbed panes, crept a modic.u.m of second-hand light from a stair.

”There!” said Dorothy. ”If you should hear any sound before I come back, run in here. See what a bolt there is to the door. Mind you shut both.

You can close that shutter over the window too if you like--only n.o.body can look in at it without getting a ladder, and there isn't one about the place. I don't believe any one knows of this room but myself.”

Juliet was too miserable to be frightened at the look of it--which was wretched enough. She promised not to leave the house, and Dorothy went.

Many times before she returned had Juliet fled from the sounds of imagined approach, and taken refuge in the musty dusk of the room withdrawn. When at last Dorothy came, she found her in it trembling.

She came, bringing a basket with every thing needful for breakfast. She had not told her father any thing: he was too simple, she said to herself, to keep a secret with comfort; and she would risk any thing rather than discovery while yet she did not clearly know what ought to be done. Her version of the excellent French proverb--_Dans le doute, abstiens-toi_--was, _When you are not sure, wait_--which goes a little further, inasmuch as it indicates expectation, and may imply faith. With difficulty she prevailed upon her to take some tea, and a little bread and b.u.t.ter, feeding her like a child, and trying to comfort her with hope. Juliet sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, the very picture of despair, white like alabaster, rather than marble--with a bluish whiteness. Her look was of one utterly lost.

”We'll let the fire out now,” said Dorothy; ”for the sun is s.h.i.+ning in warm, and there had better be no smoke. The wood is rather scarce too. I will get you some more, and here are matches: you can light it again when you please.”

She then made her a bed on the floor with a quant.i.ty of wood shavings, and some shawls she had brought, and when she had lain down upon it, kneeled beside her, and covering her face with her hands, tried to pray.

But it seemed as if all the misery of humanity was laid upon her, and G.o.d would not speak: not a sound would come from her throat, till she burst into tears and sobs. It struck a strange chord in the soul of the wife to hear the maiden weeping over her. But it was no private trouble, it was the great need common to all men that opened the fountain of her tears. It was hunger after the light that slays the darkness, after a comfort to confront every woe, a life to lift above death, an antidote to all wrong. It was one of the groanings of the spirit that can not be uttered in words articulate, or even formed into thoughts defined. But Juliet was filled only with the thought of herself and her husband, and the tears of her friend but bedewed the leaves of her bitterness, did not reach the dry roots of her misery.

Dorothy's spirit revived when she found herself once more alone in the park on her way home the second time. She must be of better courage, she said to herself. Struggling in the Slough of Despond, she had come upon one worse mired than she, for whose sake she must search yet more vigorously after the hidden stepping-stones--the peaks whose bases are the center of the world.

”G.o.d help me!” she said ever and anon as she went, and every time she said it, she quickened her pace and ran.

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