For a girl of Nesta’s head could not be deceived; she had come home with a woman’s intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it—­a knowledge drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined:  she dreaded to probe to the depth of it.  She had in her wounded breast the world’s idea, that corruption must come of the contact with impurity.

Nataly renewed her cry of despair:  ’The mother!—­the daughter!’—­her sole revelation of the heart’s hollows in her stammered speaking to Victor.

She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could repeat:  ‘The mother!—­the daughter!’ hearing the world’s words:—­the daughter excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother unpitied for the bruiting of her brazen daughter’s name:  but both alike consigned to the corners of the world’s dust-heaps.  She cried out, that her pride was broken.  Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to pieces.  The tears she restrained in Victor’s presence, were called on to come now, and she had none.  It might be, that she had not strength for weeping.  She was very weak.  Rising from bed to lock her door against Nesta’s entry to the room on her return at night, she could hardly stand:  a chill and a clouding overcame her.  The quitted bed seemed the haven of a drifted wreck to reach.

Victor tried the handle of a locked door in the dark of the early winter morning.  ‘The mother!—­the daughter!’ had swung a pendulum for some time during the night in him, too.  He would rather have been subjected to the spectacle of tears than have heard that toneless voice, as it were the dry torrent-bed rolling blocks instead of melodious, if afflicting, waters.

He told Nesta not to disturb her mother, and murmured of a headache:  ’Though, upon my word, the best cure for mama would be a look into Fredi’s eyes!’ he said, embracing his girl, quite believing in her, just a little afraid of her.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN

Pleasant things, that come to us too late for our savour of the sweetness in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk to its end.  Yesterday, before Dudley Sowerby’s visit, Nataly would have been stirred where the tears we shed for happiness or repress at a flattery dwell when seeing her friend Mrs. John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing her speak repentantly, most tenderly.  Mrs. John said:  ’You will believe I have suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think’:  and she did not set the smile of responsive humour moving; although these two ladies had a key of laughter between them.  Nataly took her kiss; held her hand, and at the parting kissed her.  She would rather have seen her friend than not:  so far she differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to the dead in the insensibility to any change of light shining on one who best loved darkness and silence.  She cried to herself wilfully, that her pride was broken:  as women do when they spurn at the wounding of a dignity they cannot protect and die to see bleeding; for in it they live.