"You have been used to something far different," said Emmanuel,
compassionately.
"My past is over," she answered in a low voice.
"But you'll come to a better future," he cried, his mild blue eyes
watery and red.
"Shall I? When I die?" was her reply as she passed her hand wearily over
her forehead, and wished--ah, how ardently!--that the question might
answer itself now at once.
But the young live against their will, and Leam, though bruised and
broken, had still the grand vitality of youth to support her. Of the
stuff of which in a good cause martyrs, in a bad criminals, are made,
she accepted her position at Windy Brow with the very heroism of
resignation. She never complained, though every circumstance, every
condition, was simply torture; and so soon as she saw what she was
expected to do, she did it without remonstrance or reluctance. Her life
there was like a lesson in a foreign language which she had undertaken
to learn by heart, and she gave herself to her task loyally. But it was
suffering beyond even what Emmanuel Gryce supposed or Keziah ever
dreamed of. She, with the sun of the South in her veins, her dreams of
pomegranates and orange-groves, of music and color and bright blue
skies, of women as beautiful as mamma, of that one man--not of the
South, but fit to have been the godlike son of Spain--suddenly
translated from soft and leafy North Aston to a bleak fell-side in the
most desolate corner of Cumberland--where for lush hedges were cold,
grim gray stone walls, and the sole flowers to be seen gorse which she
could not gather, and heather which had no perfume--to a house set so
far under the shadow that it saw the sun only for three months in the
year, and where her sole companion was old Keziah Gryce, ill-favored in
person, rough of mood if true of soul, or creatures even worse than
herself;--she, with that tenacious loyalty, that pride and concentrated
passion, that dry reserve and want of general benevolence characteristic
of her, to be suddenly cast among uncouth strangers whose ways she must
adopt, and who were physically loathsome to her; dead to the only man
she loved, his love for her killed by her own hand, herself by her own
confession accursed; and to bear it all in silent patience,--was it not
heroic? Had she been more plastic than she was, the effort would not
have been so great.
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