CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT

From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend’s help in some state of fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her body.  She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had been scattered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does.  But she was indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened world.  She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others, and made the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being is to men.  She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would have deemed it the reverse.  It was in fact the painful gathering of the atoms composing pride.  For she had not only suffered; she had done wrongly:  and when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings the wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had thought her lover:  and who was her lover once, before the crime against him.  In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure; one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately the more exquisitely rewarding.  He hated treachery:  she had been guilty of doing what he most hated.  She glorified him for the incapacity to forgive; it was to her mind godlike.  And her excuses of herself?

At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained that there was none to exonerate.  Little by little her story was related—­her version of the story:  for not even as woman to woman, friend to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night; of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief.  That was an unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to be betrayed.  Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had struck her down, rendered it difficult to be understood; and not till Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she perceive with any clearness her Tony’s motives, or mania.  The very word Money thickened the riddle:  for Tony knew that her friend’s purse was her own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation, had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in spurning her.

‘You see what I am, Emmy,’ Diana said.

‘What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.’

‘I proved myself unworthy of him.’

But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a cause, the ties uniting her to him?  Unworthiness of that kind, is not commonly the capital offence in love.  Tony’s deep prostration and her resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning within herself.  Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish in the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of love only as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair object of their courtship.