CHAPTER XXIX

CONFESSION AND COUNSEL

The sisters did not exchange a word until morning, but both of them lay
long awake. Monica was the first to lose consciousness; she slept for
about an hour, then the pains of a horrid dream disturbed her, and
again she took up the burden of thought. Such waking after brief,
broken sleep, when mind and body are beset by weariness, yet cannot
rest, when night with its awful hush and its mysterious movements makes
a strange, dread habitation for the spirit--such waking is a grim trial
of human fortitude. The blood flows sluggishly, yet subject to sudden
tremors that chill the veins and for an instant choke the heart.
Purpose is idle, the will impure; over the past hangs a shadow of
remorse, and life that must yet be lived shows lurid, a steep pathway
to the hopeless grave. Of this cup Monica drank deeply.

A fear of death compassed her about. Night after night it had thus
haunted her. In the daytime she could think of death with resignation,
as a refuge from miseries of which she saw no other end; but this hour
of silent darkness shook her with terrors. Reason availed nothing; its
exercise seemed criminal. The old faiths, never abandoned, though
modified by the breath of intellectual freedom that had just touched
her, reasserted all their power. She saw herself as a wicked woman, in
the eye of truth not less wicked than her husband declared her. A
sinner stubborn in impenitence, defending herself by a paltry ambiguity
that had all the evil of a direct lie. Her soul trembled in its
nakedness.

What redemption could there be for her? What path of spiritual health
was discoverable? She could not command herself to love the father of
her child; the repugnance with which she regarded him seemed to her a
sin against nature, yet how was she responsible for it? Would it profit
her to make confession and be humbled before him? The confession must
some day be made, if only for her child's sake; but she foresaw in it
no relief of mind. Of all human beings her husband was the one least
fitted to console and strengthen her. She cared nothing for his pardon;
from his love she shrank. But if there were some one to whom she could
utter her thoughts with the certainty of being understood--

Her sisters had not the sympathetic intelligence necessary for aiding
her; Virginia was weaker than she herself, and Alice dealt only in
sorrowful commonplaces, profitable perhaps to her own heart, b