Chapter 53

CHAPTER LIII

It was not with surprise, it was with a feeling which in other
circumstances would have had much of the effect of joy, that as
Isabel descended from the Paris Mail at Charing Cross she stepped
into the arms, as it were--or at any rate into the hands--of
Henrietta Stackpole. She had telegraphed to her friend from
Turin, and though she had not definitely said to herself that
Henrietta would meet her, she had felt her telegram would produce
some helpful result. On her long journey from Rome her mind had
been given up to vagueness; she was unable to question the
future. She performed this journey with sightless eyes and took
little pleasure in the countries she traversed, decked out though
they were in the richest freshness of spring. Her thoughts
followed their course through other countries--strange-looking,
dimly-lighted, pathless lands, in which there was no change of
seasons, but only, as it seemed, a perpetual dreariness of
winter. She had plenty to think about; but it was neither
reflexion nor conscious purpose that filled her mind.
Disconnected visions passed through it, and sudden dull gleams of
memory, of expectation. The past and the future came and went at
their will, but she saw them only in fitful images, which rose
and fell by a logic of their own. It was extraordinary the things
she remembered. Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew
something that so much concerned her and the eclipse of which had
made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect
pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their
meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with
a kind of architectural vastness. She remembered a thousand
trifles; they started to life with the spontaneity of a shiver.
She had thought them trifles at the time; now she saw that they
had been weighted with lead. Yet even now they were trifles after
all, for of what use was it to her to understand them? Nothing
seemed of use to her to-day. All purpose, all intention, was
suspended; all desire too save the single desire to reach her
much-embracing refuge. Gardencourt had been her starting-point,
and to those muffled chambers it was at least a temporary
solution to return. She had gone forth in her strength; she would
come back in her weakness, and if the place had been a rest to
her before, it would be a sanctuary now. She envied Ralph his
dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect
of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything
more--this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a
marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.

She had moments indeed in her journey from Rome which were almost
as good