Part 28 (1/2)
The first days of June broke radiantly over the great gorge and the woods which surround it. One morning, early, between four and five o'clock, Daphne came in, to find Madeleine awake and comparatively at ease. Yet the preceding twenty-four hours had been terrible, and her nurses knew that the end could not be far off.
The invalid had just asked that her couch might be drawn as near to the window as possible, and she lay looking towards the dawn, which rose in fresh and windless beauty over the town opposite and the white splendour of the Falls. The American Fall was still largely in shadow; but the light struck on the fresh green of Goat Island and leaped in tongues of fire along the edge of the Horseshoe, turning the rapids above it to flame and sending shafts into the vast tower of spray that holds the centre of the curve. Nature was all youth, glitter and delight; summer was rus.h.i.+ng on the gorge; the mingling of wood and water was at its richest and n.o.blest.
Madeleine turned her face towards the gorge, her wasted hands clasped on her breast. She beckoned Daphne with a smile, and Daphne knelt down beside her.
”The water!” said the whispering voice; ”it was once so terrible. I am not afraid--now.”
”No, darling. Why should you be?”
”I know now, I shall see him again.”
Daphne was silent.
”I hoped it, but I couldn't be certain. That was so awful. Now--I am certain.”
”Since you became a Catholic?”
She made a sign of a.s.sent.
”I couldn't be uncertain--I _couldn't_!” she added with fervour, looking strangely at Daphne. And Daphne understood that no voice less positive or self-confident than that of Catholicism, no religion less well provided with tangible rites and practices, could have lifted from the spirit the burden of that remorse which had yet killed the body.
A little later Madeleine drew her down again.
”I couldn't talk, Daphne--I was afraid; but I've written to you, just bit by bit, as I had strength. Oh, Daphne----!”
Then voice and strength failed her. Her eyes piteously followed her friend for a little, and then closed.
She lingered through the day; and at night when the June starlight was on the gorge, she pa.s.sed away, with the voice of the Falls in her dying ears. A tragic beauty--”beauty born of murmuring sound--had pa.s.sed into her face;” and that great plunge of many waters, which had been to her in life the symbol of anguish and guilt, had become in some mysterious way the comforter of her pain, the friend of her last sleep.
A letter was found for Daphne in the little box beside her bed.
It ran thus:
DAPHNE, DARLING,--
”It was I who first taught you that we may follow our own lawless wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful; it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and despise it, we mutilate the divine in ourselves.
”Oh, Daphne! it is a small thing to say 'Forgive!' Yet it means the whole world.--
”And you can still say it to the living. It has been my anguish that I could only say it to the dead.... Daphne, good-bye! I have fought a long, long fight, but G.o.d is master--I bless--I adore----”
Daphne sat staring at the letter through a mist of unwilling tears. All its phrases, ideas, preconceptions, were unwelcome, unreal to her, though she knew they had been real to Madeleine.
Yet the compulsion of the dead was upon her, and of her scene with Boyson. What they asked of her--Madeleine and Alfred Boyson--was of course out of the question; the mere thought of that humiliating word ”forgiveness” sent a tingle of pa.s.sion through her. But was there no third course?--something which might prove to all the world how full of resource and generosity a woman may be?
She pondered through some sleepless hours; and at last she saw her way plain.
Within a week she had left New York for Europe.