The Sister said nothing, but she hid her face in her hands, and thought.
The next morning, by her order, Polly came into the room, and said, “You are to go home. The carriage is at the door.” With this she retired, and Sir Charles's valet entered the room soon after to help him dress.
“Yes, Sir Charles. The carriage is at the door.”
When he got home he found a sofa placed by a fire, with wraps and pillows; his cigar case laid out, and a bottle of salts, and also a small glass of old cognac, in case of faintness.
“Which of you had the gumption to do all this?”
BELLA BRUCE was drinking the bitterest cup a young virgin soul can taste. Illusion gone--the wicked world revealed as it is, how unlike what she thought it was--love crushed in her, and not crushed out of her, as it might if she had been either proud or vain.
Frail men and women should see what a passionate but virtuous woman can suffer, when a revelation, of which they think but little, comes and blasts her young heart, and bids her dry up in a moment the deep well of her affection, since it flows for an unworthy object, and flows in vain. I tell you that the fair head severed from the chaste body is nothing to her compared with this. The fair body, pierced with heathen arrows, was nothing to her in the days of old compared with this.
In a word--for nowadays we can but amplify, and so enfeeble, what some old dead master of language, immortal though obscure, has said in words of granite--here
No fainting--no vehement weeping; but oh, such deep desolation; such weariness of life; such a pitiable restlessness. Appetite gone; the taste of food almost lost; sleep unwilling to come; and oh, the torture of waking--for at that horrible moment all rushed back at once, the joy that had been, the misery that was, the blank that was to come.
She never stirred out, except when ordered, and then went like an automaton. Pale, sorrow-stricken, and patient, she moved about, the ghost of herself; and lay down a little, and then tried to work a little, and then to read a little; and could settle to nothing but sorrow and deep despondency.
Not that she nursed her grief. She had been told to be brave, and she tried. But her grief was her master. It came welling through her eyes in a moment, of its own accord.