"As you will," returned Doctor Remy, after a pause. "At least let me wish you a short mourning, and a bright thereafter. Adieu."
He went out as he spoke, closing the door behind him. In his excitement, he used more force than he was aware of, and it fell to with a clangor that reverberated loudly through the large, uncarpeted room, and jarred painfully upon Astra's nerves. She shivered, and her eyes fell upon the clay figure. Apparently, it was trembling with sympathetic emotion; it even bent toward her, as if suddenly endued with life; for one moment, the old fable of Pygmalion seemed coming true, in her modern experience. Then, the limbs gave way, the trunk fell forward, down went Bearer and Child together, the faces of each giving her one last, distorted look of malign meaning, ere they crushed into fragments on the platform.
"It is not the only ruin that he has left behind him," murmured Astra to herself, with a sad and bitter smile.
In another moment, she too began to sink. The long fever of suspense was ended; the excitement that had carried her through the late trying interview was over; the inevitable time of reaction and depression had come. The thought of the terrible blank left in her heart and life, of the woful loss of affection, faith, and hope, that she had suffered, of the miserable waste in her past, and of the chaotic emptiness in her future, came over her with awful force. Slowly she sank, as if an invisible weight were pressing her to the earth. Settling upon her knees, she leaned her head on the ruins of her statue, and shook with sobs of tearless agony.
She knew not how long a time went by thus; it seemed to her to stretch its slow length over an age. But it is a merciful provision that acute sorrow soon exhausts itself. The mind, like the body, has beneficent limits to its power of endurance. In due time, Astra exchanged the anguish of wretchedness for its torpor. Her sobs died away, the convulsive trembling of her frame ceased, she sat up and looked around her with a face of quiet misery. Perhaps it was a little hard, too. Her pride was coming to her aid in bearing the burden for which, she told herself, she was largely accountable, and must therefore struggle along with as best she could. It was miraculously heavy, it would tax all her strength and resolution, she saw that plainly enough; but she forgot to look into it for any sign of divine origin, or promise of divine help. The baleful effect of Doctor Remy's influence still followed her, making God an overhanging Law, instead of a surrounding Love. She could not even read aright the lesson of her own fragments of clay!