“Mr Ladislaw gave it me,” said Miss Noble. “A German box—very pretty; but if it falls it always spins away as far as it can.”
“Oh, if it is Ladislaw’s present,” said Mr Farebrother, in a deep tone of comprehension, getting up and hunting. The box was found at last under a chiffonier, and Miss Noble grasped it with delight, saying, “it was under a fender the last time.”
“That is an affair of the heart with my aunt,” said Mr Farebrother, smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself.
“If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs Casaubon,” said his mother, emphatically,—“she is like a dog—she would take their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better.”
“Mr Ladislaw’s shoes, I would,” said Henrietta Noble.
Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return. She was surprised and annoyed to find that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it was quite useless to try after a recovery of her former animation. Alarmed at herself—fearing some further betrayal of a change so marked in its occasion, she rose and said in a low voice with undisguised anxiety, “I must go; I have overtired myself.”
Mr Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, “It is true; you must have half-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate. That sort of work tells upon one after the excitement is over.”
He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt to speak, even when he said good-night.
The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless within the clutch of inescapable anguish. Dismissing Tantripp with a few faint words, she locked her door, and turning away from it towards the vacant room she pressed her hands hard on the top of her head, and moaned out—
“Oh, I did love him!”
Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too thoroughly to leave any power of thought. She could only cry in loud whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome—after her lost joy of clinging with silent love and faith to one who, misprized by others, was worthy in her thought—after her lost woman’s pride of reigning in his memory—after her sweet dim perspective of hope, that along some pathway they should meet with unchanged recognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.
In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man—she besought hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman’s frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.
There were two images—two living forms that tore her heart in two, as if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her
