CHAPTER III.
TOWARD six o'clock the next morning, the light pouring in on her face
awoke Magdalen in the bedroom in Rosemary Lane.
She started from her deep, dreamless repose of the past night with that
painful sense of bewilderment, on first waking, which is familiar to all
sleepers in strange beds. "Norah!" she called out mechanically, when she
opened her eyes. The next instant her mind roused itself, and her senses
told her the truth. She looked round the miserable room with a loathing
recognition of it. The sordid contrast which the place presented to
all that she had been accustomed to see in her own bed-chamber—the
practical abandonment, implied in its scanty furniture, of those elegant
purities of personal habit to which she had been accustomed from her
childhood—shocked that sense of bodily self-respect in Magdalen which
is a refined woman's second nature. Contemptible as the influence
seemed, when compared with her situation at that moment, the bare
sight of the jug and basin in a corner of the room decided her first
resolution when she woke. She determined, then and there, to leave
Rosemary Lane.
How was she to leave it? With Captain Wragge, or without him?
She dressed herself, with a dainty shrinking from everything in the room
which her hands or her clothes touched in the process, and then opened
the window. The autumn air felt keen and sweet; and the little patch of
sky that she could see was warmly bright already with the new sunlight. Distant voices of bargemen on the river, and the chirping of birds among the weeds which topped the old city wall, were the only sounds that broke the morning silence. She sat down by the window; and searched her mind for the thoughts which she had lost, when weariness overcame her on the night before.
The first subject to which she returned was the vagabond subject of
Captain Wragge.
The "moral agriculturist" had failed to remove her personal distrust of
him, cunningly as he had tried to plead against it by openly confessing
the impostures that he had practiced on others. He had raised her
opinion of his abilities; he had amused her by his humor; he had
astonished her by his assurance; but he had left her original conviction
that he was a Rogue exactly where it was when he first met with her. If the one design then in her mind had been the design of going on the stage, she would, at all hazards, have rejected the more than doubtful assistance of Captain Wragge on the spot.
But the perilous journey on which she had now adventured herself had
another end in view—an end, dark and distant—an end, with pitfalls
hidden on the way to it, far other than the shallow pitfalls on the
way to the stage. In the mysterious stillness of the morning, her mind
looked on to its second and its deeper design, and the despicable figure
of the swindler rose before her in a new view.
She tried to shut him out—to feel above him and beyond him again, as
she had felt up to this time.
After a little trifling with her dress, she took from her bosom the
white silk bag which her own hands had made on the farewell night at
Combe-Raven. It drew together at the mouth with delicate silken strings. The first thing she took out, on opening it, was a lock of Frank's hair, tied with a morsel of silver thread; the next was a sheet of paper containing the extracts which she had copied from her father's will and her father's letter; the last was a closely-folded packet of bank-notes, to the value of nearly two hundred pounds—the produce (as Miss Garth had rightly conjectured) of the sale of her jewelry and her dresses, in which the servant at the boarding-school had privately assisted her. She put back the notes at once, without a second glance at them, and then sat looking thoughtfully at the lock of hair as it lay on her lap. "You are better than nothing," she said, speaking to it with a girl's fanciful tenderness. "I can sit and look at you sometimes, till I almost think I am looking at Frank. Oh, my darling! my darling!" Her voice faltered softly, and she put the lock of hair, with a languid gentleness, to her lips. It fell from her fingers into her bosom. A lovely tinge of color rose on her cheeks, and spread downward to her neck, as if it followed the falling hair. She closed her eyes, and let her fair head droop softly. The world passed from her; and, for one enchanted moment, Love opened the gates of Paradise to the daughter of Eve.