He was saying, “We must go in. Can you go in?” She breathed, “I can.”
That dinner! That after-dinner in the drawing-room upstairs! It is a nightmare to be imagined, not to be described. Imagine walking from the darkness and the frightful secret of the passage into the blazing dazzle and the glittering eyes of the resplendent dinner party! They, in Harry’s absence, have been exchanging the last private nods and flashes. “Soon! Soon!” they have been nodding to one another. Uncle Pyke, licking his chops anticipatorily of his bath in his soup, has been licking them also in relish of working off his daughter in this excellent match; Aunt Belle, kind, kind Aunt Belle, with a last satisfied eye about the appointments of the table, has patted her Laetitia’s hand and conveyed to her, “Soon, soon, darling; soon, soon!” Beautiful Laetitia has given a gentle, glad squeeze to the patting hand and smiled a lovely, happy, certain smile. “Soon! Soon!” has gone the jolly signal—and it is not going to be soon, nor late; it is never, never going to happen; and worse than never happen!
Worse than never happen! That’s it. That is the awful knowledge of awful guilt with which Rosalie sits there and freezes in guilty agony at every pause in the conversation and could scream to notice how the pauses grow longer and longer, more frequent and more frequent yet. There’s a frightful constraint, a chilly, creepy dreadfulness steals about the party. They go upstairs—Aunt Belle and Rosalie and beautiful Laetitia—and the constraint goes with them. They sit and stare and hardly a word said. Something’s up! What’s up? What’s the matter with everything? Why is everything hanging like this! What’s up? And the men come in—Uncle Pyke swollen with food, swollen with indigestion, swollen with baffled perplexity and ferocious irritation; and Harry—she dare not look at Harry—and the thing is worse, the awfulness more awful. Glances go shooting round the awful silences—Uncle Pyke’s atrabilious eye in the burning fiery furnace of his swollen face is a stupendous note of interrogation directed upon Aunt Belle; Aunt Belle’s eyebrows arch to scalp and appear likely to disappear into her scalp and remain there in the effort to express, “I don’t know! I can’t imagine!”; Laetitia—Laetitia’s eyes upon her mother are as a spaniel’s upon one devouring meat at table.
Frightfulness more frightful, awfulness more awful; in Rosalie almost now beyond control the desire to scream, or to burst into tears or wildly into laughter. Then she knows herself upon her feet and hears her voice: “Aunt Belle. I must go, I think. I think I am very tired to-night.”
They suffer her to go.
That’s all a nightmare; but, when the door is closed upon them, like a nightmare gone. She was alone upon the staircase and then down in the hall—by those coats!—and, as though no ghastly interval had been, the amazing and beloved moment was returned to her. Out of a nightmare into a dream! She stood in her dream a moment—two moments—three—by the hall door. Who till that evening never had thought of love, astonishingly was invested with all love’s darling cunning. She felt somehow he would see her again before she left; and love’s dear cunning told her right. He came swiftly down the stairs. She never knew on what pretext he had left the room. He came to her. Love loves these snatched moments and always makes them snatched to breathlessness. She opened the door and must be gone. She said to him, speaking first, “Oh, we were vile in there! How vile we were!”
It was, the intimacy and the abruptness of it, the perfect comprehension that their thoughts were shared, as if they had known and loved for years.
He caught her hand. “My conspirator! My secret-sharer!”
She gave him her heart in her eyes.
He said, “To-morrow, I will come to you.”
She disengaged her hand.
He gave a swift look all about and caught her in his arms. “You must tell me, my Rosalie. Tell me.”
She breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that I loved you.”
When she was home and got to her room she undressed, suffering her clothes to lie as they slipped from her. She got into bed, moving there and then lying there as one in trance.
Cataclysm! All she had been, all she had determined—all, all gone; all nothing, surrendered all. At a touch, in a moment, without a cry, without a shot, without a stroke, all her life’s habit swept away. All she had been, all she’d designed, all she had built within herself and walled about herself, all she had scorned, all that with a violent antipathy she had shuddered from or with curled lip spurned away,—all, all betrayed, breached, mined, calamitously riven, tumultously sundered, burst away.
She turned her face to the pillow and began to cry—most frightfully.
It was very terrible for Rosalie.
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