TEXT C When Maggie was gone to
sleep, Stephen, weary too with his unaccustomed amount of rowing and with the
intense inward life of the last twelve hours, but too restless to sleep, walked
and lounged about the deck, with his cigar, far on into midnight, not seeing the
dark water--hardly conscious there were stars-living only in the near and
distant future. At last fatigue conquered restlessness, and he rolled himself up
in a piece of tarpaulin on the deck near Maggie’s feet. She had
fallen asleep before nine, and had been sleeping for six hours before the
faintest hint of a midsummer daybreak was discernible. She awoke from that vivid
dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper rest. She was in a boat on the
wide water with Stephen, and in the gathering darkness something like a star
appeared, that grew and grew till they saw it was the Virgin seated in St Ogg’s
boat, and it came nearer and nearer till they saw the Virgin was Lucy and the
boatman was Philip, who rowed past without looking at her; and she rose to
stretch out her arms and call to him, and their own boat turned over with the
movement and they began to sink, till with one spasm of dread she seemed to
awake and find she was a child again in the parlour at evening twilight. From
the soothed sense of that false waking she passed to the real waking, to the
plash of water against the vessel, and the sound of a footstep on the deck, and
the awful starlit sky. There was a moment of utter bewilderment before her mind
could get disentangled from the confused web of dreams; but soon the whole
terrible truth urged itself upon her. Stephen was not by her now: she was alone
with her own memory and her own dread. The irrevocable wrong
that must blot her life had been committed--she had brought sorrow into the
lives of others--into the lives that were knit up with hers by trust and love.
The feeling of a few short weeks had hurried her into the sins her nature had
most recoiled from--breach of faith and cruel selfishness; she had rent the ties
that had given meaning to duty, and had made herself an outlawed soul with no
guide but the wayward choice of her own passion. And where would that lead her
--where had it led her now She had said she would rather die than fall into
that temptation. She felt it now--now that the consequences of such a fall had
come before the outward act was completed. There was at least this fruit from
all her years of striving after the highest and best--that her soul, though
betrayed, beguiled, ensnared, could never deliberately consent to a choice of
the lower. Her life with Stephen could have no sacredness; she
must for ever sink and wander vaguely, driven by uncertain impulse; for she had
let go the clue of life--that clue which once in the far off years her young
need had clutched so strongly. She had renounced all delights then, before she
knew them, before they had come within her reach; Philip had been right when he
told her that she knew nothing of renunciation: she had thought it was quiet
ecstasy; she saw it face to face now--that sad patient living strength which
holds the clue of life, and saw that the thorns were for ever pressing on its
brow. That yesterday which could never be revoked--if she could exchange it now
for any length of inward silent endurance she would have bowed beneath that
cross with a sense of rest. The author intends to present the reader an analysis of Maggie’s ______.