Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair in the coffin; tears of a complicated origin, of a nature indescribable, almost indefinable except as other than those of simple sorrow. Assuredly their wonted fires must have lived in Fanny's ashes when eve nts were so shaped as to chariot her hither in this natural, unobtrusive, yet effectual manner. The one feat alone - that of dying - by which a mean condition could be resolved into a grand one, Fanny had achieved And to that had destiny subjoined this re ncounter tonight, which hid, in Bathsheba's wild imagining, turned her companion's failure to success, her humiliation to triumph, her lucklessness to ascendency; it had thrown over herself a garish light of mockery, and set upon all things about her an i ronical smile.
Fanny's face was framed in by that yellow hair of hers; and there was no longer much room for doubt as to the origin of the curl owned by Troy.
In Bathsheba's heated fancy the innocent white countenance-pressed a dim triumphant consciousness of the pain s he was retaliating for her pain with all the merciless rigour of the Mosaic law; `Burning for burning; wound for wound; strife for strife.'
Bathsheba indulged in contemplation of escape from her position by immediate death, which, thought she, though it was an inconvenient and awful way, had limits to its inconvenience and awfulness that could not be overpassed; whilst the shames of life were measureless. Yet even this scheme of extinction by death was but tamely copying her rival's method without the reasons which had glorified it in her rival's case. She glided rapidly up and down the room, as was mostly her habit when excited, her hands ha nging clasped in front of her, as she thought and in part expressed in broken words:
`O, I hate her, yet I don't mean that I hate her, for it is grievous and wicked; and yet I hate her a little! Yes, my flesh insists upon hating her, whether my spirit is willing or no!... If she had only lived, I could have been angry and cruel towards her with some justification; but to be vindictive towards a poor dead woman recoils upon myself. O God, have mercy!
I am miserable at all this!'
Bathsheba became at this moment so terrified at her own state of mind that she looked around for some sort of refuge from herself. The vision of Oak kneeling down that night recurred to her, and with the imitative instinct which animates women she seized upon the idea, resolved to kneel, and, if possible, pray. Gabriel had prayed; so would she.
She knelt beside the coffin, covered her face with her hands, and for a time the room was silent as a tomb. Whether from a purely mechanical, or from any other cause, when Bathsheba arose it was with a quieted spirit, and a regret for the antagonistic ins tincts which had seized upon her just before.
In her desire to make atonement she took flowers from a vase by the window, and began laying them around the dead girl's head. Bathsheba knew no other way of showing kindness to persons departed than by giving them flowers. She knew not how long she remai ned engaged thus. She forgot time, life, where she was, what she was doing. A slamming together of the coach-house doors in the yard brought her to herself again. An instant after, the front door opened and closed, steps crossed the hall, and her husband appeared at the entrance to the room, looking in upon her.
He beheld it all by degrees, stared in stupefaction at the scene, as if he thought it an illusion raised by some fiendish incantation. Bathsheba, pallid as a corpse on end, gazed back at him in the same wild way.
So little are instinctive guesses the fruit of a legitimate induction that, at this moment, as he stood with the door in his hand, Troy never once thought of Fanny in connection with what he saw. His first confused idea was that somebody in the house had died.
`Well - what?' said Troy blankly.
`I must go! I must go!' said Bathsheba, to herself more than to him.
She came with a dilated eye towards the door, to push past him.
`What's the matter, in God's name? who's dead?' said Troy. `I cannot say; let me go out. I want air!' she continued.
`But no; stay, I insist!' He seized her hand, and then volition seemed to leave her, and she went off into a state of passivity. He, still holding her, came up the room, and thus, hand in hand, Troy and Bathsheba approached the coffin's side.
The candle was standing on a bureau close by them, and the light, slanted down, distinctly enkindling the cold features of both mother and babe.
Troy looked in, dropped his wife's hand, knowledge of it all come over him in a lurid sheen, and he stood stil l.
