The New Magdalen

THE narrative leaves Julian and Mercy for a while, and, ascending to the

upper regions of the house, follows the march of events in Lady Janet's

room.

The maid had delivered her mistress's note to Mercy, and had gone away

again on her second errand to Grace Roseberry in her boudoir. Lady Janet

was seated at her writing-table, waiting for the appearance of the woman

whom she had summoned to her presence. A single lamp diffused its mild

light over the books, pictures, and busts round her, leaving the further

end of the room, in which the bed was placed, almost lost in obscurity.

The works of art were all portraits; the books were all presentation

copies from the authors. It was Lady Janet's fancy to associate her

bedroom with memorials of the various persons whom she had known in the

long course of her life--all of them more or less distinguished, most of

them, by this time, gathered with the dead.

She sat near her writing-table, lying back in her easy-chair--the living

realization of the picture which Julian's description had drawn. Her

eyes were fixed on a photographic likeness of Mercy, which was so raised

upon a little gilt easel as to enable her to contemplate it under the

full light of the lamp. The bright, mobile old face was strangely and

sadly changed. The brow was fixed; the mouth was rigid; the whole face

would have been like a mask, molded in the hardest forms of passive

resistance and suppressed rage, but for the light and life still thrown

over it by the eyes. There was something unutterably touching in the

keen hungering tenderness of the look which they fixed on the portrait,

intensified by an underlying expression of fond and patient reproach.

The danger which Julian so wisely dreaded was in the rest of the face;

the love which he had so truly described was in the eyes alone. _They_

still spoke of the cruelly profaned affection which had been the one

immeasurable joy, the one inexhaustible hope of Lady Janet's closing

life. The brow expressed nothing but her obstinate determination to

stand by the wreck of that joy, to rekindle the dead ashes of that hope.

The lips were only eloquent of her unflinching resolution to ignore the

hateful present and to save the sacred past. "My idol may be shattered,

but none of you shall know it. I stop the march of discovery; I

extinguish the light of truth. I am deaf to your words; am blind to your

proofs. At seventy years old, my idol is my life. It shall be my idol

still."

The silence in the bedroom was broken by a murmuring of women's voices

outside the door.

Lady Janet instantly raised herself in the chair and snatched the

photograph off the easel. She laid the portrait face downward, among

some papers on the table, then abruptly changed her mind, and hid it

among the thick folds of lace which clothed her neck and bosom. There

was a world of love in the action itself, and in the sudden softening of

the eyes which accompanied it. The next moment Lady Janet's mask was on.

Any superficial observer who had seen her now would have said, "This is

a hard woman!"