Still her thoughts did not dwell on Philip. He was simply a part of that dull mass of pain that beset her and made her feel, as she had felt when drowning, that her heart had left her breast and nothing but will remained. She felt now, as then, the capacity to act with more than her accustomed resolution, though all that was within her seemed boiling up into her brain. As for Philip, all seemed a mere negation; there was a vacuum where his place had been. At most the thought of him came to her as some strange, vague thrill of added torture, penetrating her soul and then passing; just as ever and anon there came the sound of the fog-whistle on Brenton's Reef, miles away, piercing the dull air with its shrill and desolate wail, then dying into silence.
What a hopeless cloud lay upon them all forever,--upon Kate, upon Harry, upon their whole house! Then there was John Lambert; how could they keep it from him? how could they tell him? Who could predict what he would say? Would he take the worst and coarsest view of his young wife's mad action or the mildest? Would he be strong or weak; and what would be weakness, and what strength, in a position so strange? Would he put Emilia from him, send her out in the world desolate, her soul stained but by one wrong passion, yet with her reputation blighted as if there were no good in her? Could he be asked to shield and protect her, or what would become of her? She was legally a wife, and could only be separated from him through convicted shame.
Then, if separated, she could only marry Philip. Hope nerved herself to think of that, and it cost less effort than she expected.
There seemed a numbness on that side, instead of pain. But granting that he loved Emilia ever so deeply, was he a man to surrender his life and his ease and his fair name, in a hopeless effort to remove the ban that the world would place on her. Hope knew he would not; knew that even the simple-hearted and straightforward Harry would be far more capable of such heroism than the sentimental Malbone. Here the pang suddenly struck her; she was not so numb, after all!
As the leaves beside the window drooped motionless in the dank air, so her mind drooped into a settled depression. She pitied herself,--that lowest ebb of melancholy self-consciousness. She went back to Emilia, and, seating herself, studied every line of the girl's face, the soft texture of her hair, the veining of her eyelids. They were so lovely, she felt a sort of physical impulse to kiss them, as if they belonged to some utter stranger, whom she might be nursing in a hospital. Emilia looked as innocent as when Hope had tended her in the cradle.
What is there, Hope thought, in sleep, in trance, and in death, that removes all harsh or disturbing impressions, and leaves only the most delicate and purest traits? Does the mind wander, and does an angel keep its place? Or is there really no sin but in thought, and are our sleeping thoughts incapable of sin? Perhaps even when we dream of doing wrong, the dream comes in a shape so lovely and misleading that we never recognize it for evil, and it makes no stain. Are our lives ever so pure as our dreams?
This thought somehow smote across her conscience, always so strong, and stirred it into a kind of spasm of introspection.
"How selfish have I, too, been!" she thought. "I saw only what I wished to see, did only what I preferred. Loving Philip" (for the sudden self-reproach left her free to think of him), "I could not see that I was separating him from one whom he might perhaps have truly loved. If he made me blind, may he not easily have bewildered her, and have been himself bewildered? How I tried to force myself upon him, too!
Ungenerous, unwomanly! What am I, that I should judge another?"
She threw herself on her knees at the bedside.
Still Emilia slept, but now she stirred her head in the slightest possible way, so that a single tress of silken hair slipped from its companions, and lay across her face. It was a faint sign that the trance was waning; the slight pressure disturbed her nerves, and her lips trembled once or twice, as if to relieve themselves of the soft annoyance. Hope watched her in a vague, distant way, took note of the minutest motion, yet as if some vast weight hung upon her own limbs and made all interference impossible. Still there was a fascination of sympathy in dwelling on that atom of discomfort, that tiny suffering, which she alone could remove. The very vastness of this tragedy that hung about the house made it an inexpressible relief to her to turn and concentrate her thoughts for a moment on this slight distress, so easily ended.
Strange, by what slender threads our lives are knitted to each other! Here was one who had taken Hope's whole existence in her hands, crushed it, and thrown it away. Hope had soberly said to herself, just before, that death would be better than life for her young sister. Yet now it moved her beyond endurance to see that fair form troubled, even while unconscious, by a feather's weight of pain; and all the lifelong habit of tenderness resumed in a moment its sway.
She approached her fingers to the offending tress, very slowly, half withholding them at the very last, as if the touch would burn her. She was almost surprised that it did not. She looked to see if it did not hurt Emilia. But it now seemed as if the slumbering girl enjoyed the caressing contact of the smooth fingers, and turned her head, almost imperceptibly, to meet them. This was more than Hope could bear. It was as if that slight motion were a puncture to relieve her overburdened heart; a thousand thoughts swept over her,--of their father, of her sister's childhood, of her years of absent expectation; she thought how young the girl was, how fascinating, how passionate, how tempted; all this swept across her in a great wave of nervous reaction, and when Emilia returned to consciousness, she was lying in her sister's arms, her face bathed in Hope's tears.
