CHAPTER VIII

To a woman like Audrey Noel, born to be the counterpart and complement of another,—­whose occupations and effort were inherently divorced from the continuity of any stiff and strenuous purpose of her own, the uprooting she had voluntarily undergone was a serious matter.

Bereaved of the faces of her flowers, the friendly sighing of her lime-tree, the wants of her cottagers; bereaved of that busy monotony of little home things which is the stay and solace of lonely women, she was extraordinarily lost.  Even music for review seemed to have failed her.  She had never lived in London, so that she had not the refuge of old haunts and habits, but had to make her own—­and to make habits and haunts required a heart that could at least stretch out feelers and lay hold of things, and her heart was not now able.  When she had struggled with her Edwardian flat, and laid down her simple routine of meals, she was as stranded as ever was, convict let out of prison.  She had not even that great support, the necessity of hiding her feelings for fear of disturbing others.  She was planted there, with her longing and grief, and nothing, nobody, to take her out of herself.  Having wilfully embraced this position, she tried to make the best of it, feeling it less intolerable, at all events, than staying on at Monkland, where she had made that grievous, and unpardonable error—­falling in love.

This offence, on the part of one who felt within herself a great capacity to enjoy and to confer happiness, had arisen—­like the other grievous and unpardonable offence, her marriage—­from too much disposition to yield herself to the personality of another.  But it was cold comfort to know that the desire to give and to receive love had twice over left her—­a dead woman.  Whatever the nature of those immature sensations with which, as a girl of twenty, she had accepted her husband, in her feeling towards Miltoun there was not only abandonment, but the higher flame of self-renunciation.  She wanted to do the best for him, and had not even the consolation of the knowledge that she had sacrificed herself for his advantage.  All had been taken out of her hands!  Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious.  If it were ordained that she should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent in sterility and ashes that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was, none the less, too far-fetched.  If she rebelled, it would not be in spirit, but in action.  General principles were nothing to her; she lost no force brooding over the justice or injustice of her situation, but merely tried to digest its facts.