she had a habit of taking off her mental clothing, as she might take off a dress, and
looking at it as though it belonged to some one else, and as though sensations were
manufactured like clothes. This seems to be one of the easier ways of deadening
sorrow, as though the mind could teach itself to lop off its feelers. Sybil particularly
disliked this self-inspection. In the first place she did not understand it, and in the
second her mind was all feelers, and amputation was death. She could no more analyse
a feeling than doubt its existence, both which were habits of her sister.
How was Sybil to know what was passing in Carrington's mind? He was thinking of
nothing in which she supposed herself interested. He was troubled with memories of
civil war and of associations still earlier, belonging to an age already vanishing or
vanished; but what could she know about civil war who had been almost an infant at the
time? At this moment, she happened to be interested in the baffle of Waterloo, for she
was reading "Vanity Fair," and had cried as she ought for poor little Emmy, when her
husband, George Osborne, lay dead on the field there, with a bullet through his heart.
But how was she to know that here, only a few rods before her, lay scores and
hundreds of George Osbornes, or his betters, and in their graves the love and hope of
many Emmys, not creatures of the imagination, but flesh and blood, like herself? To her,
there was no more in those associations which made Carrington groan in the silence of
his thoughts, than if he had been old Kaspar, and she the little Wilhelmine. What was a
skull more or less to her? What concern had she in the famous victory?
Yet even Sybil was startled as she rode through the gate and found herself suddenly
met by the long white ranks of head-stones, stretching up and down the hill-sides by
thousands, in order of baffle; as though Cadmus had reversed his myth, and had sown
living men, to come up dragons' teeth. She drew in her horse with a shiver and a
sudden impulse to cry. Here was something new to her. This was war--wounds,
disease, death. She dropped her voice and with a look almost as serious as
Carrington's, asked what all these graves meant. When Carrington told her, she began
for the first time to catch some dim notion why his face was not quite as gay as her own.
Even now this idea was not very precise, for he said little about himself, but at least she
grappled with the fact that he had actually, year after year, carried arms against these
men who lay at her feet and who had given their lives for her cause. It suddenly
occurred to her as a new thought that perhaps he himself might have killed one of them
with his own hand. There was a strange shock in this idea. She felt that Carrington was
further from her. He gained dignity in his rebel isolation. She wanted to ask him how he
could have been a traitor, and she did not dare. Carrington a traitor!
Carrington killing her friends! The idea was too large to grasp. She fell back on the
simpler task of wondering how he had looked in his rebel uniform.
They rode slowly round to the door of the house and dismounted, after he had with
some difficulty found a man to hold their horses. From the heavy brick porch they
looked across the superb river to the raw and incoherent ugliness of the city, idealised
into dreamy beauty by the atmosphere, and the soft background of purple hills behind.
