Herbert instantly recognized the gilding on the cover, imitated from a design invented by himself. He remembered the inscription, and yet he read it again:
“To dear Catherine, from Herbert, on the anniversary of our marriage.”
The book dropped from his hand on the table, as if it had been a new discovery, torturing him with a new pain.
His wife (he persisted in thinking of her as his wife) must have occupied the room--might perhaps have been the person whom he had succeeded, as a guest at the hotel. Did she still value his present to her, in remembrance of old times? No! She valued it so little that she had evidently forgotten it. Perhaps her maid might have included it among the small articles of luggage when they left home, or dear little Kitty might have put it into one of her mother’s trunks. In any case, there it was now, abandoned in the drawer of a table at a hotel.
“Oh,” he thought bitterly, “if I could only feel as coldly toward Catherine as she feels toward me!” His resolution had resisted much; but this final trial of his self-control was more than he could sustain. He dropped into a chair--his pride of manhood recoiled from the contemptible weakness of crying--he tried to remember that she had divorced him, and taken his child from him. In vain! in vain! He burst into tears.
With a heart lightened by reconciliation (not the first reconciliation unhappily), with hopes revived, and sweet content restored, Sydney’s serenity of mind was not quite unruffled. Her thoughts were not dwelling on the evil life which she had honestly deplored, or on the wronged wife to whom she had been eager to make atonement. Where is the woman whose sorrows are not thrown into the shade by the bright renewal of love? The one anxiety that troubled Sydney was caused by remembrance of the letter which she had sent to the convent at Sandyseal.
As her better mind now viewed it, she had doubly injured Herbert--first in distrusting him; then by appealing from him to the compassion of strangers.
If the reply for which she had rashly asked was waiting for her at that moment--if the mercy of the Mother Superior was ready to comfort and guide her--what return could she make? how could she excuse herself from accepting what was offered in kindly reply to her own petition? She had placed herself, for all she knew to the contrary, between two alternatives of ingratitude equally unendurable, equally degrading. To feel this was to feel the suspense which, to persons of excitable temperament, is of all trials the hardest to bear. The chambermaid was still in her room--Sydney asked if the post-office was near to the hotel.