UGUST the Spinner, robed in floating, purple hazes, her distaff wound with silver cobwebs, had journeyed up the mountain sides to meet her sister, September, on the summits—September, the painter, with her crown of scarlet and gold leaves and her palette set with brilliant colours.
On the first day of the new queen's reign Frances had gone alone to Garvin's library, and now stood in the handsome, spacious, rather austere room, aimlessly drawing books from the shelves, turning the pages, scanning them with unseeing eyes and putting them back again. For the last week she had suffered a feeling of depression, slight at first, but deepening day by day, until it became an obsessing unrest and longing for which she could find no name; but which "kindled by night and subdued her" until, this first day of September, she felt disconsolate, almost to tears.
Ever since the day when she had started to follow Ethel and old Andrew Campbell up the road, she had known this reaction of feeling, and she was peculiarly unable to cope with it, inasmuch as she had never been a woman of moods. Her poise was the habit of years, won by the choice of an occupation which imposed on her a constant self-control. So long had she invited others to come and lean on her that their weakness, drawing on her strength, had so augmented her calm security of self that she entirely forgot the tiger of temperament chained in the deeps of her nature. But now it lifted its head and stirred in sleep.
We speak always in extremes—pain, pleasure; light, darkness; joy, sorrow. These are stimulants and goads. When pain grips us we rise to the conflict and struggle to find relief. We spring to welcome joy; but there is a state of feeling, or more fitly, a lack of feeling where both pain and pleasure are lost from our consciousness. Perhaps without warning or premonition, the dish of life is suddenly without salt or savour; the vibrating light and colour of the universe is washed out to one grey, colourless monotone, the dull day merges into a black, stifling night without a star, without one breeze of freshness.
When we suffer, we strive to find words to express our anguish. "I am a companion to owls and a brother to dragons"; but the groper in the grey world mutters with Job: "A land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness."
The days of the outer world were still as gold and purple as those in which Frances had rejoiced; but she could no longer enter the heart of their splendour and warm her hands at the inner glow. The bloom was off the summer; no longer the maternal arms of her mother, Earth, enfolded her. In her effort to throw off this deadening apathy, she would read and reread the books she had loved; but they were without meaning; or she would walk miles in her futile attempts to recapture the mood of yesterday, to feel again her nearness to Nature and rid herself of this body of death—the sense of isolation from all natural sights and sounds.
But even in the pine forests, those leagues of scented gloom, where whispers and intimations of unfathomable mysteries had reached her, she knew no mitigation of her weary ennui. Sometimes the wind in the pine tops was like the distant booming of cathedral bells, and again like the solemn surges of the sea; but it could not call back her spirit from the wastes of desolation. She was numb almost to deadness.
It was in this mood that she stood in the library, idly fingering the books, and remaining entirely uninterested in their contents. There is repose and serenity in the very atmosphere of a library; but Frances was too half-hearted and recent a student to accept that balm, that divine solace with which great books heal their lovers. A feeling of profound loneliness swept over her. What was the matter? she asked herself. Why, why, had this wonderful revelation come to her in these mountains, this lifting of the veil which showed to her eager vision her new worlds and worlds? And then, just as she had begun to live in their courts and palaces, the curtain had fallen and she was thrust into the isolation of the "world without any order."
A wave of self-pity foreign to her nature broke over her, and the unusual tears smarted in her eyes. She dropped her face in her hands and then lifted it quickly as the handle of the door turned, the curtain was thrust aside and Garvin stood on the threshold. Frances's heart gave one quick throb, and although she stood perfectly still, she began to tremble violently from head to foot, gazing straight at him with wide, doubting eyes, in the depths of which a light slowly dawned.