Book 6 - Chapter 14

Waking

When Maggie was gone to sleep, Stephen, weary too with his
unaccustomed amount of rowing, and with the intense inward life of the
last twelve hours, but too restless to sleep, walked and lounged about
the deck with his cigar far on into midnight, not seeing the dark
water, hardly conscious there were stars, living only in the near and
distant future. At last fatigue conquered restlessness, and he rolled
himself up in a piece of tarpaulin on the deck near Maggie's feet.

She had fallen asleep before nine, and had been sleeping for six hours
before the faintest hint of a midsummer daybreak was discernible. She
awoke from that vivid dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper
rest. She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and in the
gathering darkness something like a star appeared, that grew and grew
till they saw it was the Virgin seated in St. Ogg's boat, and it came
nearer and nearer, till they saw the Virgin was Lucy and the boatman
was Philip,--no, not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without
looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms and call to him,
and their own boat turned over with the movement, and they began to
sink, till with one spasm of dread she seemed to awake, and find she
was a child again in the parlor at evening twilight, and Tom was not
really angry. From the soothed sense of that false waking she passed
to the real waking,--to the plash of water against the vessel, and the
sound of a footstep on the deck, and the awful starlit sky. There was
a moment of utter bewilderment before her mind could get disentangled
from the confused web of dreams; but soon the whole terrible truth
urged itself upon her. Stephen was not by her now; she was alone with
her own memory and her own dread. The irrevocable wrong that must blot
her life had been committed; she had brought sorrow into the lives of
others,--into the lives that were knit up with hers by trust and love.
The feeling of a few short weeks had hurried her into the sins her
nature had most recoiled from,--breach of faith and cruel selfishness;
she had rent the ties that had given meaning to duty, and had made
herself an outlawed soul, with no guide but the wayward choice of her
own passion. And where would that lead her? Where had it led her now?
She had said she would rather die than fall into that temptation. She
felt it now,--now that the consequences of such a fall had come before
the outward act was completed. There was at least this fruit from all
her years of striving after the highest and best,--that her soul
though betrayed, beguiled, ensnared, could never deliberately consent
to a choice of the lower. And a choice of what? O God! not a choice of
joy, but of conscious cruelty and hardness; for