IV.


The door opened, and she felt herself free to come out. How long she had
been there, or what passed there, is not for any one to say. She came out
tingling and smarting--if such words can be used--with an intolerable
recollection of the last act of her life. So intolerable was it that all
that had gone before, and all the risings up of old errors and visions
long dead, were forgotten in the sharp and keen prick of this, which was
not over and done like the rest. No one had accused her, or brought
before her judge the things that were against her. She it was who had
done it all,--she, whose memory did not spare her one fault, who
remembered everything. But when she came to that last frivolity of her
old age, and saw for the first time how she had played with the future
of the child whom she had brought up, and abandoned to the hardest
fate,--for nothing, for folly, for a jest,--the horror and bitterness of
the thought filled her mind to overflowing. In the first anguish of that
recollection she had to go forth, receiving no word of comfort in respect
to it, meeting only with a look of sadness and compassion, which went to
her very heart. She came forth as if she had been driven away, but not by
any outward influence, by the force of her own miserable sensations. "I
will write," she said to herself, "and tell them; I will go--" And then
she stopped short, remembering that she could neither go nor write,--that
all communication with the world she had left was closed. Was it all
closed? Was there no way in which a message could reach those who
remained behind? She caught the first passer-by whom she passed, and
addressed him piteously. "Oh, tell me,--you have been longer here than
I,--cannot one send a letter, a message, if it were only a single word?"