第29章 BARBARA OF THE HOUSE OF GREBE(12)

she was in an epileptic fit.He started up,dismayed by the sense that,like many other subtle personages,he had been too exacting for his own interests.Such love as he was capable of,though rather a selfish gloating than a cherishing solicitude,was fanned into life on the instant.He closed the wardrobe with the pulley,clasped her in his arms,took her gently to the window,and did all he could to restore her.

It was a long time before the Countess came to herself,and when she did so,a considerable change seemed to have taken place in her emotions.She flung her arms around him,and with gasps of fear abjectly kissed him many times,at last bursting into tears.She had never wept in this scene before.

'You'll take it away,dearest--you will!'she begged plaintively.

'If you love me.'

'I do--oh,I do!'

'And hate him,and his memory?'

'Yes--yes!'

'Thoroughly?'

'I cannot endure recollection of him!'cried the poor Countess slavishly.'It fills me with shame--how could I ever be so depraved!I'll never behave badly again,Uplandtowers;and you will never put the hated statue again before my eyes?'

He felt that he could promise with perfect safety.'Never,'said he.

'And then I'll love you,'she returned eagerly,as if dreading lest the scourge should be applied anew.'And I'll never,never dream of thinking a single thought that seems like faithlessness to my marriage vow.'

The strange thing now was that this fictitious love wrung from her by terror took on,through mere habit of enactment,a certain quality of reality.A servile mood of attachment to the Earl became distinctly visible in her contemporaneously with an actual dislike for her late husband's memory.The mood of attachment grew and continued when the statue was removed.A permanent revulsion was operant in her,which intensified as time wore on.How fright could have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say;but I believe such cases of reactionary instinct are not unknown.

The upshot was that the cure became so permanent as to be itself a new disease.She clung to him so tightly,that she would not willingly be out of his sight for a moment.She would have no sitting-room apart from his,though she could not help starting when he entered suddenly to her.Her eyes were well-nigh always fixed upon him.If he drove out,she wished to go with him;his slightest civilities to other women made her frantically jealous;till at length her very fidelity became a burden to him,absorbing his time,and curtailing his liberty,and causing him to curse and swear.If he ever spoke sharply to her now,she did not revenge herself by flying off to a mental world of her own;all that affection for another,which had provided her with a resource,was now a cold black cinder.