It was not in the immediate road to anywhere,
and so there was no occasion for any of the household or the garden to go
through it or near it. She did not put on a hat, but took only a
sunshade, which she used in passing over the lawn. The grove was on the
side of the house away from her own room and the breakfast-room. When
she had reached its shade she felt that at last she was alone. The grove was a privileged place. Long ago a great number of young
beeches had been planted so thickly that as they grew they shot up
straight and branchless in their struggle for the light. Not till they
had reached a considerable altitude had they been thinned; and then the
thinning had been so effected that, as the high branches began to shoot
out in the freer space, they met in time and interlaced so closely that
they made in many places a perfect screen of leafy shade. Here and there
were rifts or openings through which the light passed; under such places
the grass was fine and green, or the wild hyacinths in due season tinged
the earth with blue. Through the grove some wide alleys had been left:
great broad walks where the soft grass grew short and fine, and to whose
edges came a drooping of branches and an upspringing of undergrowth of
laurel and rhododendron. At the far ends of these walks were little
pavilions of marble built in the classic style which ruled for garden use
two hundred years ago. At the near ends some of them were close to the
broad stretch of water from whose edges ran back the great sloping banks
of emerald sward dotted here and there with great forest trees. The
grove was protected by a ha-ha, so that it was never invaded from
without, and the servants of the house, both the domestics and the
gardeners and grooms, had been always forbidden to enter it. Thus by
long usage it had become a place of quiet and solitude for the members of
the family. To this soothing spot had come Stephen in her pain. The long spell of
self-restraint during that morning had almost driven her to frenzy, and
she sought solitude as an anodyne to her tortured soul. The long anguish
of a third sleepless night, following on a day of humiliation and terror,
had destroyed for a time the natural resilience of a healthy nature. She
had been for so long in the prison of her own purpose with Fear as
warder; the fetters of conventional life had so galled her that here in
the accustomed solitude of this place, in which from childhood she had
been used to move and think freely, she felt as does a captive who has
escaped from an irksome durance. As Stephen had all along been free of
movement and speech, no such opportunities of freedom called to her. The
pent-up passion in her, however, found its own relief. Her voice was
silent, and she moved with slow steps, halting often between the green
tree-trunks in the cool shade; but her thoughts ran free, and passion
found a vent. No stranger seeing the tall, queenly girl moving slowly
through the trees could have imagined the fierce passion which blazed
within her, unless he had been close enough to see her eyes. The habit
of physical restraint to which all her life she had been accustomed, and
which was intensified by the experience of the past thirty-six hours,
still ruled her, even here. Gradually the habit of security began to
prevail, and the shackles to melt away. Here had she come in all her
childish troubles. Here had she fought with herself, and conquered
herself. Here the spirits of the place were with her and not against
her. Here memory in its second degree, habit, gave her the full sense of
spiritual freedom. As she walked to and fro the raging of her spirit changed its objective:
from restraint to its final causes; and chief amongst them the pride
which had been so grievously hurt. How she loathed the day that had
passed, and how more than all she hated herself for her part in it; her
mad, foolish, idiotic, self-importance which gave her the idea of such an
act and urged her to the bitter end of its carrying out; her mulish
obstinacy in persisting when every fibre of her being had revolted at the
doing, and when deep in her inmost soul was a deterring sense of its
futility. How could she have stooped to have done such a thing: to ask a
man . . . oh! the shame of it, the shame of it all! How could she have
been so blind as to think that such a man was worthy! . . . In the midst of her whirlwind of passion came a solitary gleam of relief:
she knew with certainty that she did not love Leonard; that she had never
loved him. The coldness of disdain to him, the fear of his future acts
which was based on disbelief of the existence of that finer nature with
which she had credited him, all proved to her convincingly that he could
never really have been within the charmed circle of her inner life. Did
she but know it, there was an even stronger evidence of her indifference
to him in the ready manner in which her thoughts flew past him in their
circling sweep. For a moment she saw him as the centre of a host of
besetting fears; but her own sense of superior power nullified the force
of the vision. She was able to cope with him and his doings, were there
such need. And so her mind flew back to the personal side of her
trouble: her blindness, her folly, her shame. In truth she was doing good work for herself. Her mind was working truly
and to a beneficent end. One by one she was overcoming the false issues
of her passion and drifting to an end in which she would see herself face
to face and would place so truly the blame for what had been as to make
it a warning and ennobling lesson of her life. She moved more quickly,
passing to and fro as does a panther in its cage when the desire of
forest freedom is heavy upon it. That which makes the irony of life will perhaps never be understood in
its casual aspect by the finite mind of man. The 'why' and 'wherefore'
and the 'how' of it is only to be understood by that All-wise
intelligence which can scan the future as well as the present, and see
the far far-reaching ramifications of those schemes of final development
to which the manifestation of completed character tend. To any mortal it would seem a pity that to Stephen in her solitude, when
her passion was working itself out to an end which might be good, should
come an interruption which would throw it back upon itself in such a way
as to multiply its malignant force. But again it is a part of the Great
Plan that instruments whose use man's finite mind could never predicate
should be employed: the seeming good to evil, the seeming evil to good. As she swept to and fro, her raging spirit compelling to violent
movement, Stephen's eyes were arrested by the figure of a man coming
through the aisles of the grove. At such a time any interruption of her
passion was a cause for heightening anger; but the presence of a person
was as a draught to a full-fed furnace.