Red as a Rose is She: A Novel
TextStill he is dumb.
"Do you?" she repeats, excitedly, the quick breath passing to and fro pantingly across the threshold of her crimson lips.
"Why do you insist on making me uncivil?" he says, with a sarcastic smile. "I do not believe you. I dare say you fancy you are telling truth; but if another man were to come on the scene with a few thousands a-year more, and a higher position in the social scale, you would enact the same part over again. Women must be true to their instincts. Those who are bent on rising must kick down the ladder by which they have climbed: it is an irreversible law."
"You are mistaken," she says, eagerly. "I have no desire to climb; if I came here with any silly, childish idea that rich people were happier than poor ones, I have been quite disillusioned. Bob" (how oddly the little unromantic name comes in among her heroics!) – "Bob is a happier man than you are, though he is only a lieutenant in a foot regiment, and has next to nothing to live upon."
"I have no doubt that Bob" (with a little sneering emphasis on the monosyllable) "is in all respects a very superior person to me," says St. John, with a bitter pale smile, like a gleam of wrathful sunlight on a day of east wind and clouds and driving sleet.
"I quite agree with you," she answers eagerly, her great eyes flashing angry, like unwonted meteors that blaze fitful in the winter sky, "and I wish to Heaven I had never left him!"
Over Gerard's features a spasm, contracting and puckering them, passes ugly and painful; his hands clench themselves in the mightiness of his effort to govern his smitten soul. "That is easily remedied," he answers, after a little pause, in a clear cold voice. "Why should not you go back to him as you came? There is no reason why he should ever hear of this – this episode, this interlude, this farce."
"And you think that I am to be bandied about like a bale of goods!" she cries, scornfully, voice trembling and lip quivering with passion. "You are like the woman in the Judgment of Solomon, who said, 'Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it!' You love me! You never did!"
"Perhaps not," he answers, with slow difficulty; "perhaps what I loved was my ideal that I fancied I had found in you, and when I found I was mistaken, perhaps the love went too! My God, I wish it had!"
Through the proud calmness of his voice penetrates a tone of bitter, unwilling tenderness. Hearing it, her whole soul is melted into fresh, quick tears.
"It is not my ideal, or any one else's, that I love in you!" she cries, stretching out eager white arms towards him; "it is yourself – your very self! Oh, if I could but tear out my heart, and show it you! Oh! why won't you believe me?"
He looks at her – looks at the innocently-wooing arms, at the tear-stained, dimpled, tremulous face – and feels his resolution wasting away like wax before the fire, as Samson's wasted away in Delilah's lap. He turns his eyes away across the cool silvered flood, and hardens his heart against her.
"Why cannot you?" she repeats, in her sweet, vibrating voice.
"Because I have not the faith that removes mountains," he answers, harshly; "because a thing must be probable, or at least possible, before I can give credit to it; because I am unable to understand how, for a man whom you confess to having thought ill-looking, ill-tempered, and ill-mannered, you could, out of pure disinterested love, throw over one to whom you must, at least, have pretended to be sincerely attached."
"I never pretended anything of the kind," she answers, vehemently. "If you don't believe me, ask him. I was engaged to him because he seemed unhappy, and because I did not see any particular reason why I should not, and because he asked me."
Through all his bitter, surging wrath, St. John can hardly forbear a smile. "And you became engaged to me because I asked you?" he says, drily. "At that rate, there is no reason why the number of your aspirants should not be increased ad infinitum.
"And were you going to play the play out to the end, may I ask, and marry us both?" he inquires, in the same cutting key.
No woman can stand being sneered at; she much prefers having the tables and chairs flung at her head.
"Do you think it manly or witty to jeer at me," cries Essie, stung almost to madness by his taunts, "because I have been fool enough to desert for you a man worth a hundred of you?"
Gerard stands motionless in the moonlight, with folded arms, and a chill, painful smile on his stern mouth. "I have already announced my conviction of his superiority, and have advised you to return to him," he says.
"Do you mean really?" asks Essie, her wild, wide eyes flaming in half-incredulous fear on his face.
"I do," he answers, with icy steadiness.
"And you have done with me altogether?" she says, brokenly, her tears forcing their way through her slight shielding fingers, and falling one after another, slow and heavy, on the stones at her feet. "Serve me right! – Serve me right!"
Once again, intoxicated by her great fairness, he goes nigh to pardoning her; once again his obstinate will comes to his aid. "If I were to marry you now," he says, resolutely, "my life would be one long suspicion: I should love you madly, and should disbelieve in you."
With that, and his saying he should love her madly, a little creeping hope steals warmly about her heart. "Why should you disbelieve in me?" she asks, putting out a timid peace-making hand.
"Because a faith once broken can never be mended," he answers, sternly – "it may be patched up, but a patched faith will not do to go through life with; because a woman who has deceived a man once for one object may deceive him a second time for another. I should never," he says (words coming quicker and emotion deepening as he proceeds), "look in your sweet eyes without thinking I read some treachery in them; I should never press your heart against mine without fearing that it was beating for some one else."
She withdraws her rejected hand, and falls to weeping sorelier than ever, but very mutely.
"What madness induced you to tell me so many lies?" he cries, passionately, with mournful severity. "Were you bent on putting a gulf, that could never be bridged through all eternity, between us? Did not you know that that is the one sin I could never forget or forgive?"
She looks down humbled and crestfallen, and says, sobbingly, "I was afraid of you. I thought that, if I told you, I should lose you as I have done now, without telling you. I was on the point of speaking two or three times, but you looked so angry that my courage failed, and I dared not."
"Afraid of me!" he says, reproachfully. "By your own showing, then, you could not have loved me perfectly, for 'perfect love casteth out fear,' If you are afraid of me, it is indeed time for us to part."
"I see you are bent on misconstruing every word I say," she says, hopelessly, and yet with a little petulant movement of shoulder and head, "and so I'll hold my tongue."
He looks at her, not relentingly, but with infinite sadness. "I almost wish that Constance had left me in my Fool's Paradise!" he says.
"Constance!" exclaims Esther, quickly. "Was it she that told you?"
"It was," he answers, quietly: "she heard it this morning; she was annoyed with me for not going to the ball, and chose this ingenious and, I must say, complete mode of revenge."
"What had I done to her?" says Essie, bringing her two hands together sharply, and looking upwards to Heaven's great black, blue floor above her,
"Thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
"What had I done to her," she says, in a sort of wonder, "that she should do me such a mischief?"
Looking at her as she stands with upturned eyes, like some sweet prayerful saint or penitent Magdalen, drawn by a cunning hand that has been resolved three centuries back into elemental dust – dust that has stopped a bunghole perhaps, like Alexander's – Gerard's resolution breaks a little; not his resolution of parting from her —that remains firm as ever – but his power of so parting with nonchalant coldness. "Child!" he cries, a little roughly, and yet with a half-groan, placing a hand heavily on each of her shoulders – "Child! why are you so pretty? If it was your nature to be deceitful and underhand, why could not you be ugly too? Your beauty is the one thing about you that I believe in, and it drives me distracted!"
"And yet," she answers, with a melancholy smile, "you told me just now, very calmly, to go back to – to him: you seemed to contemplate with great equanimity the prospect of seeing me and my distracting beauty" (with a bitter emphasis) "in another man's possession."
"You are mistaken," he answers, with quick violence. "By God's help, I'll never see you again after to-night."
Hearing that heavy sentence, her knees tremble beneath her a little; a momentary dimness comes over her eyes; voice, breath, and heart seem to suspend their functions. No word of protest, of lamentation, of entreaty, crosses her whitened lips.
"What right have I to be with you?" he asks, indignantly – "I, who cannot see you without coveting you? What right have I to steal another man's wife, any more than his horse or his money?"
"Let me go, then," she answers, with a low, moaning sigh – "since it must be so. You know what is right better than I do. Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!" he answers, very shortly, and turns away his head sharply, that only the lake and the stars may see the distortion that the passion of that parting is working on his face.
"Say you forgive me before I go!" says the tender, tremulous voice, that might unman a hero – might unsaint an anchorite – as she lingers yet a little minute beside him.
"Why should I say what is not true?" he asks, turning round roughly upon her. "I don't forgive you, and never shall, either in this world or the next."
"You must!" she says, sobbingly, the words coming a little wildly through a tempest of tears. "I cannot go unless you do; if I went now, I should remember you all my life as you are to-day; to-day would blot out all the happy hours we have been together!"
For all answer he turns away from her, and buries his face in his hands.
"Look at me kindly once again!" she says, calmness growing out of her strong emotion, putting up her two small hands and trying to draw his away from before his hidden face. "I may be very wicked; I suppose I am – as you say so – mean, underhand, deceitful; but yet, for the sake of what is gone, look at me kindly once again: that won't hurt you, as it is for the very last time!"
Still Gerard remains speechless – not from obstinacy, but because he cannot command his voice: and his pride revolts from speaking shakily, quaveringly, like an hysterical woman or paralytic old man.
"If I were a thief, or a murderer!" she says, indignantly, withdrawing her hands, "you could not turn from me with greater loathing!"
"You are a murderer!" he answers, with fierce vehemence, looking at her once again as she had asked him – looking at her with wrathful, reluctant passion, but not kindly. "You have murdered my whole future – my hope, my belief in women, in truth – my everything of life but what is merely animal. If you had murdered my body I could have forgiven you much more easily. Time or disease must have done that sooner or later, but now – " He stops abruptly.
"If I am a murderer, I am a suicide too," she replies, with a smile more tearful than her tears. "St. John," she says, earnestly, "don't you know that people always attend to dying requests, however foolish and unreasonable they may be? This of mine is a dying request, for after to-night I shall be dead to you. Say, 'Essie, I forgive you.'"
"What is it to you whether I forgive you or not?" he inquires, sullenly, with a certain savage pulling and biting of his moustache. "Are you mistaking me for Brandon again? Why should two indifferent acquaintances like us go through the farce of begging each other's pardons? What are we to one another?"
"Nothing," she answers, calmly; "you need not be so eager to remind me of that; my memory needs no refreshing; but we have been something – do what you will you cannot take that away from me – so for the sake of that 'have been,' say you forgive me!"
"Falsehoods don't pass my lips so glibly as they do yours," he answers, doggedly. "If I were to say, 'I forgive you' a thousand times, I should be no nearer the doing it. Good-bye!" he says again, abruptly, putting out his hand; feeling that the strain is too great for him, and that if it last much longer he, being but human, will break under it. Her answering farewell is to fling herself upon his breast.
"I can no more say 'good-bye,'" she says, desperately, in a passionate whisper, "than you can say 'I forgive you.' St. John, take me back, try me once again! I know I ought not to say it – that it is undignified, unwomanly, perhaps – but I cannot see my everything going away from me without reaching out a hand to stop it. Oh, my darling! give me one more trial!"
Her arms cling about his brown throat close as the bindweed clings about the hedges in sultry August; her white warm breast heaves and pants against his, as the sea heaves and pants against the shore's tawny sides; her eyes, impassioned as only dark eyes can be – alluring, despairing – flame into his eyes, and down through his eyes into his heart. Prisoned in those sweet, frail fetters, he feels strength and name and fame ebbing from him, as Merlin's ebbed under Vivien's wily charm.
"Is not it better to be tricked by such a woman," Passion whispers, "than to spend long æons of unswerving fidelity with one less maddeningly fair? Were not such moments of ecstasy very cheaply purchased, even by years of suspicion and deceit?" But Will and Honour push her back with their strong right hands. "She has deceived you once, and therefore she will deceive you twice. She is enacting this melodrama on your breast: she may enact the next on another man's. Put her away! – put her away!"
Hearkening to them, he, with a groan as of one that teareth out his right eye, with relentless fingers unfastens her arms from about his neck. "Your darling!" he says, contemptuously; "you are forgetting whom you are addressing!"
"I am, indeed," she answers, with a sudden revulsion of feeling; "but it is a mistake that one does not make twice in a lifetime."
"I hope not," he answers, taking, refuge in surly rudeness from the almost overpowering temptation to fall at her feet and say, "Essie, come to me! deceive me! outwit me! overreach me; do what you please, I cannot help it! If there were a thousand Brandons and ten thousand treacheries between us, I must be yours, and you must be mine!"
"I have degraded myself once to the dust before you," rejoins Essie, in a voice that tries to be angry, but is only trembling; "but there is no fear of my doing it again. And yet," she continues, after a pause, her soft nature making it more difficult for her to part from him in anger than to incur his contempt by again descending to supplication – "and yet, since I have confessed to having been wicked, you might as well forgive me. How much the better will you be for going through life with the consciousness that you have made one wretched woman even more unhappy than she would otherwise have been? You forgave that other girl who deceived you because she did not love you. Forgive me, who deceived you, because I loved you too well!"
"I forgave her," he answers, sternly, "because I had ceased to care about her – because what she stole from me had lost its value. Perhaps at some future period I may be in the same frame of mind towards you; at present I am some way off it. I neither can forgive you, nor have I the slightest wish to do so!"
Seeing that she is abasing herself in vain, she refrains. "Well, then, since you wish it, so it must be," she answers, with meek despair; and catching suddenly his hand before he has time to prevent her, she kisses it very humbly and sorrowfully. Then, unforgiven, unrecalled, she passes away. And Gerard, the battle over, the victory won, sits down on a garden-seat, and cries like a child for his pretty lost plaything.
CHAPTER XIX
And so that act of the play is finished: all the actors have strutted and fumed and fretted through their little parts, and now the curtain has fallen. When next it rises, the principal actress in this tragic drama is discovered lying full-dressed on her bed; her pretty face buried – eyes, nose, and mouth – in the tumbled pillow; her little neat-shod feet hanging over the bedside. She looks as if she had been thrown there, an inert, passive mass, by some spiteful giant. Six miles away, at Lord – 's ball, the fiddles are squeaking, and the pink-and-green Chinese lanterns swinging to and fro among the orange boughs in the slight wind made by the rustling dresses and passing men and women. Sir Thomas, with his hands in their burst white gloves under his coat tails, and his blue-cloth back leaning against a marble mantel-piece, is talking sweetly, in his hard, rasping voice, of scab and foot-rot. Miladi is gone down to supper for the sixth time on the sixth devoted married man's arm; she is eating game pie, and drinking sherry and champagne and moselle in turns. Miss Blessington, sweeping about on the arm of a small white gentleman, whose estate is as large as his person is minute, is responding a little superciliously to a presumptuous younger son, who, annihilated by her Greek profile and Juno bust, has invited her to tread a measure with him.
"No, tha – anks; I never da – ance round da – ances."
Meanwhile Esther lies stretched upon the counterpane, while a gloomy pageant of all that she has lost passes before her eyes. Greedier than the dog in the fable, she had tried to keep shadow and substance: Gerard's love, Brandon's liking. Now, lo! both have fallen into the water. There are a few circles, a few rising bubbles; then all is over – gone, sunk to the bottom, to come up again never more. Vanished from her grasp is the great house – are the buhl and marqueterie cabinets – are the "Venus surprised by Satyrs" and the "Susanna and the Elders" – are the vineries, pineries, peacheries. Did they ever exist? or were they only a mirage, such as the sky presents to us sometimes – a mirage of ships shocking together, of armed men meeting in fight?
"Go back to your pigstye!" said the magic fish to Ilsabil, the fisherman's wife, when she modestly requested to be made lord of the sun and moon. "Go back to your pigstye!" cries Fate to Esther. At any other time the subsiding from the prospect of being rather a great lady into the certainty of being a very small one would have caused considerable annoyance to Esther's aspiring soul. Now, the things she has lost merge and lose themselves in the person she has lost. But is he lost necessarily, irrecoverably? Despite the forlorn attitude, the tear-swollen face, trying to suffocate itself in down, Hope is busy whispering, "You will see him again to-morrow: men in real life are not like men in novels – changeless of purpose, hard as iron or adamant. What they are one half-hour, they are the exact reverse of the next; what they swear to-night they will unswear to-morrow." As Hope, the deceiver, thus murmurs, there comes to her ear the sound of wheels briskly rolling to the door. "Is the ball over so early? are they come back already? or – ?" She does not give herself time to speculate on any other hypothesis, but, springing from the bed, runs to the window, draws aside curtain and blind, and looks out. The hall-door is open; a vehicle stands before it. The moonlight and the light shed from the hanging-lamp in the portico are fighting together, struggling for possession of a horse and dog-cart, of two footmen's floured heads, and of a portmanteau and hat-box that they are carrying out. "Thud! thud!" she hears the portmanteau go in at the back of the cart. Then a man comes out – a man in hat and overcoat – drawing on dogskin gloves, and saying, "John, go and look for my box of cigar-lights; I left it on the smoking-room table." It is St. John, speaking in much his usual voice. He is going away! going away! and he can think of his cigar-lights! Her heart stops pulsing for a second, then sets off galloping at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Going without making any sign! She leans further out of the window, and rests her white arms, that look whiter than any lilies in the moonlight, on the sill. He is so close beneath her, if the servants were not there, she might call to him; as it is, he will never know that she has watched his departure. A sudden impulse prompts her to throw up the window higher, to rustle her dress, to cough, in order to attract his attention. At the unexpected noise John and Thomas turn their heads and look up, but their master does not. He gives a slight start, but, instantly recovering himself, walks steadily to the cart and gets in. Then she knows that he knows that she is looking at him – knows that he is resolute to part from her —
"taking no farewell – "
as Lancelot took none of Elaine.
The horse is a little fidgety at starting. "Wo-o-o! Gently, old lass!" This is the affecting form that St. John's last words take. She cranes her neck out of the window; she leans out her lithe body, reckless of the danger of losing her balance and tumbling on the hard gravel drive below, in her eagerness to catch the last glimpse of the lessening, dwindling bulk; then, forgetting to shut the window, careless of any cold or stock of rheumatism that she might be laying up for herself, she returns to her former position, flings herself again prone on her bed, again buries her face in the pillow; but this time no beguiling hope sits and whispers pleasant falsities to her. Hope got up upon the dog-cart, and drove away with Gerard.
The night wanes; morning dreams, that they say come true, invade many sleepers' brains. At Lord – 's ball people are still dancing with the fury produced by champagne and supper; but Sir Thomas, Miladi, and Miss Blessington, are at home again, and in bed. Constance is not one of those hard dancers who think that one after-supper galop is worth ten ante-coenal ones. Not for all the entrancing valses Strauss ever composed would she run the risk of damaging the freshness of her toilette, nor the still more serious risk of exchanging the marble coolness of her cheeks for the unsightly flush of heat or the ugly pallor of exhaustion.
Dawn is just beginning stealthily to unlatch the eastern gate; her torch, new-lit, makes but a puny opponent for the night's one great and myriad lesser lamps. Esther has fallen into an uneasy doze, her damp brow and loosened hair resting on her bare, outflung arm. Suddenly a knock at her door makes her start up in a vague, confused horror. Is it St. John come back? Is it some one come to murder her? A thousand impossibilities flash across her bewildered brain. Without waiting for permission, the person who knocked enters; not St. John, nor a murderer – only a dishevelled housemaid, who has evidently just thrown a gown over her night attire, and endeavoured abortively to gather up the straggling hair out of her sleepy eyes under a muslin cap put on awry.
"A tallygraph for you, miss!" says she, coming forward, holding in one hand a blue envelope, and in the other a tall, solemn tallow candle, as sleepy as herself.
A telegraphic message! Oh hateful telegraph! Cruellest of modern inventions! Oh hastener of evil tidings, that, without you, come all too speedily! Oh maker of sick hearts and blanched cheeks and arrested pulses!
Esther snatches it, while a sudden, awful cold grasps her heart, and reads by the wavering, feeble light these words, in a scrawly clerk's hand:
"Robert Brandon to Esther Craven. Come home instantly; Jack is very ill."
With how few pen-strokes can a death-warrant be written! For a moment she sits bolt upright, void of breath or motion, as a white dead woman, from the house of whose fair body the spirit departed an hour ago; the telegram grasped in a stiff hand that knows not of it. Then consciousness returns, brought back by a huge, tearing, killing agony; then even the agony yields to one intense, consuming longing – one all-dominating purpose – the longing to slay time and space; to be with him now, this instant; to be beside Jack dying, not Jack dead.
"Can I see Sir Thomas?" she asks collectedly, but in a rough, deep voice. "I have had bad news from home: my brother is very ill."
"Indeed, 'm, you don't say so;" replies the servant, growing broadly awake under the delightful excitement of a calamity having happened to somebody, and of herself being the first recipient of the news.
"I must see Sir Thomas!" Esther says, putting her hand up in a bewildered way to her head, and then springing off the bed and walking quickly towards the door.
"See Sir Thomas," repeats the woman, the most unfeigned alarm painting itself on her broad face – "now! Indeed, ma'am, you must be mad to think of such a thing! It would be as much as all our places are worth if he were to be disturbed before his usual time."
Esther turns and clutches her arm, while her great eyes brimful of despair, burn on her face. "I tell you my brother is dying!" she says, hoarsely – "I know he is; I must go to him this minute; for God's sake help me to get to the station!"
"Indeed, 'm, I'm sorry to see you in such trouble, that I am!" answers her companion, moved to compassion by the terrible, haggard misery of the young, round face, that she, in company with her fellow-servants, had often admired in its happy, dewy rosiness at prayers on Sunday evenings; "but, you see, all the men are in bed, and Simpson 'ud cut off his own 'ead afore he'd venture to take out the carriage without Sir Thomas's orders."
The tall, yellow candle flares between them: lights up the tortured beauty of the one woman, the placid stolidity of the other. Esther groans, and smites her hands together.
"Is there no vehicle I can have?" she asks in impatient agony – "no cart? – no anything? I'd give all I have in the world to any one who would take me. Oh God! how many minutes I am wasting."
The housemaid puts down her flat candlestick on the table, and rubs her forehead with her rough fore-finger to aid her thinking powers. "There's the dog-cart that the under-servants goes to church in," she says, presently, with an uncertain suggestion: "if we could knock the men up, you might have it, perhaps."
"Knock them up this instant, then!" cries Esther, with passionate urgency – "now, this minute! Go, for God's sake!"
So saying, she almost pushes the woman out of the room, and herself follows her. Through long passages and corridors, full of emptiness and darkness – darkness utter and complete, save where through the gallery's high-stained east window the chilly, chilly dawn comes peeping, with a grey glimmer, about the black frames, never closing eyes, and stiff, prim simpers of the family portraits – down to the lower regions, where the huge kitchen-grate yawns, black as Erebus – up steep back-stairs along other passages. In one of these passages Esther stands, her frame trembling and teeth chattering with cold and nervous excitement, while her companion raps with broad, hard knuckles on a door, and loudly calls on Simpson to awake. But hard workers are hard sleepers, and it is some time before the coachman can be induced to leave the country of slumber. When at length he is aroused, and has come out to them, in all the yawning sulkiness of disturbed sleep, it is a still longer time before he can be induced to admit the possibility of any vehicle whatever being put at Esther's disposal: with so righteous a fear of his wrath has Sir Thomas succeeded in inspiring his subordinates.
It is not without the aid of all her remaining money, with the exception of what is needed for the purchase of her railway ticket – not without the aid of all that is left of poor Jack's hardly-spared five-pound note – that she is able at length to induce him to consent to the getting ready of the dog-cart "in which the under-servants goes to church." Fully three-quarters of an hour more elapse before one of the helpers can be knocked up, can dress himself, can harness the oldest and screwiest horse in the stables, and put him, with many a muttered grumble, into the cart. Wretched Esther follows the man and his lanthorn to the stable-yard, with the vain idea that her presence may hurry his movements. During most of the three-quarters of an hour she walks quickly up and down over the hard, round stones with which the yard is paved, or stands watching, with greedy eyes, every step in the harnessing process; while her hands clench themselves, as his are clenched who is dead by some very cruel, violent death, and a pain like a red-hot, two-bladed knife keeps running through her heart. Before the horse is well between the shafts, she has climbed into the cart and taken her seat.
"The luggage is not in yet, 'm," suggests the groom, respectfully.
"Oh! never mind the luggage," cries Esther, feverishly; "I don't want it! I don't want anything! I'm ready! Get in, please, and set off this minute!"
Dawn is breaking, slowly, coldly, greyly, without any of the rose-coloured splendours that mostly gild the day's childhood, as the glorious delusions of youth gild our morning. There has not been a positive, actual frost in the night – not frost enough to congeal the wayside pools or to kill the dahlias – but the air has, for all that, a frosty crispness, as of the first breath of coming winter. The trees and hedgerow holly-bushes loom gigantic, formless, treble and quadruple their real size, folded round and round in a mantle of mist; the meadows are like lakes of mist; sheets of vapour steaming damply up to the shapeless, colourless, low-stooping heavens. Esther has forgotten to take any wrap: through the poor protection of her thin cotton dress and jacket the mist creeps slowly, searchingly, making her limbs shake and shudder; but she herself is unconscious of it – she could not have told you afterwards whether she had been warm or cold.