CHAPTER XXX.
OLD MEMORIES AND PRESENT STRUGGLES.
It was some moments before Miss Spicer’s voice died away at the front door; and for a long time Mrs. Lambert walked to and fro on that moss-like carpet, treading down its clustering blossoms as if she longed to trample them out of sight forever. The elegant coldness of her manner had vanished entirely; her hands were clenched, her lips moved, uttering nothing but shadowy words, until at last they broke into sound.
“So they will make a lion of him. Even these girls have found out how more than handsome he is; how infinitely above the shallow men they profess to admire. Great heavens! has it come to this? Thirty-nine years of age, and jealous of him now, as I was then! Oh, how I did love him—how I do love him! Can such feelings die? Can the grave bury them? Can a human soul cast them off? And I, I met him with scorn. The madness of that fatal hour seized upon me when he stood before my face, like one from the tomb. How could I look him in the face? Why was it that my pride refused to bow itself, while half my being yearned toward him? What does he think of me? Scorn and loathing! Scorn and loathing! What else can I expect? What else would a sane woman wish? But is this sanity? Will this passion haunt me forever? Even thus, is it not better than the barren life I have led all these years?”
The woman, too restless for continued motion, threw herself on a couch, and buried her hot cheek in its amber cushions, as she had done years before, when love for this one man threw her heart into tumults of tenderness or doubt. Had years done nothing for her then? Had time dug no gulf between them deep enough to terrify her heart from its hungry longing? Had silence, like that of the grave, failed to chill it into indifference?
He had asked none of these questions. Would he ever care to have them answered? Was the heart he had given her, dead? Yes, yes! he had left her to bitter retribution. The passionate reproaches with which she had driven him from her in his first youth, when a keen sense of his poverty and her riches gave a double sting to her cruel words, had been fatal. Her sin against him had been too great.
This woman was not given to weeping, but she cried like a child now. For weeks and weeks she had expected Ross to seek her again. In spite of everything, she had a lingering faith in the love which had seemed immortal, and still trusted in the great nobility which had seemed capable of infinite forgiveness. But he did not come; and now she heard his name uttered by that flighty girl, suddenly, and with flippant ease, as if it were not a thousand times removed from her, or the females she coupled with it.
While the lady lay prostrate thus wounding her soul with bitter memories, her maid came in, saw that she was resting, and left a note upon the table near her couch. She started up, as the door closed, holding her breath. It was from him; she knew that before the address met her eye—knew it by the wild tumult in her bosom, by the joy and pain that thrilled her from head to foot.
How strangely her name looked written in that hand. The seal—ah, yes! she remembered it. Letters upon a tombstone could not have made her heart sink so heavily. Her fingers were cold as she broke the wax, and, oh! how they trembled as she unfolded the paper underneath.
The note began coldly. It addressed her as Mrs. Lambert—the hateful name that clung around her like a serpent now. In that name the writer embodied ten thousand reproaches—a world of withering contempt. It was needless, she thought, to utter it in any other form. Still, he made, or implied, a request—that was something; a request, where he might have commanded, and she would not have dared to disobey. It was a little matter. He had just learned that an invitation had been sent to Mrs. Lambert for his sister’s party—a thing he had not thought to provide against—and which might seem like an ungenerous effort to place her in a false position. It was, perhaps, best that they two should learn to meet in the world to which she belonged, and thus spare themselves the pain of such accidental encounters as circumstances might force upon them; but of that, she must judge, and hold herself free to accept, or refuse, this invitation to his sister’s house, as her own wishes might dictate.
The note was cold and formal enough. Ross said nothing of his own wishes, but left her free—a thing which no woman ever yet desired, where the man she loved was concerned. But, chilling as it was, this woman pressed it to her lips and her heart, with a wild and passionate fervor never known to her girlhood, or that of any other woman. Over and over again she devoured the words with her eyes, and would, if possible, have plucked them from the paper with her lips. Would she go? Would she meet him again? Yes; if an army had stood between her and him, she would have forced a passage through. So completely had her heart taken up its old passion for the man whom she had cruelly wronged.