REFLECTIONS.
Left alone with Lady, his mare, Richard could not help brooding--rather
than pondering--over what the old woman had said. Not that for a moment
he contemplated as a possibility the acceptance of the witch's offer. To
come himself into any such close relations with her as that would imply,
was in repulsiveness second only to the idea of subjecting Dorothy to
her influences. For something to occupy his hands, that his mind might
be restless at will, he gave his mare a careful currying, then an extra
feed of oats, and then a gallop; after which it was time to go to bed.
I doubt if anything but the consciousness of crime will keep healthy
youth awake, and as such consciousness is generally far from it, youth
seldom counts the watches of the night. Richard soon fell fast asleep,
and dreamed that his patron saint--alas for his protestantism!--appeared
to him, handed him a lance headed with a single flashing diamond, and
told him to go and therewith kill the dragon. But just as he was asking
the way to the dragon's den, that he might perform his behest, the saint
vanished, and feeling the lance melting away in his grasp, he gradually
woke to find it gone.
After a long talk with his father in the study, he was left to his own
resources for the remainder of the day; and as it passed and the night
drew on, the offer of the witch kept growing upon his imagination, and
his longing to see Dorothy became stronger and stronger, until at last
it was almost too intense to be borne. He had never before known such a
possession, and was more than half inclined to attribute it to the arts
of mother Rees.
His father was busy in his study below, writing letters--an employment
which now occupied much of his time; and Richard sat alone in a chamber
in the upper part of one of the many gables of the house, which he had
occupied longer than he could remember. Its one small projecting
lozenge-paned window looked towards Dorothy's home. Some years ago he
had been able to see her window, from it through a gap in the trees, by
favour of which, indeed, they had indulged in a system of communications
by means of coloured flags--so satisfactory that Dorothy not only
pressed into the service all the old frocks she could find, but got into
trouble by cutting up one almost new for the enlargement of the somewhat
limited scope of their telegraphy. In this window he now sat, sending
his soul through the darkness, milky with the clouded light of half an
old moon, towards the ancient sun-dial, where Time stood so still that
sometimes Richard had known an hour there pass in a moment.
Never until now had he felt enmity in space: it had been hitherto rather
as a bridge to bear him to Dorothy than a gulf to divide him from her
presence; but now, through the interpenetrative power of feeling, their
alienation had affected all around as well as within him, and space
appeared as a solid enemy, and darkness as an unfriendly enchantress,
each doing what it could to separate betwixt him and the being to whom
his soul was drawn as--no, there was no AS for such drawing. No
opposition of mere circumstances could have created the feeling; it was
the sense of an inward separation taking form outwardly. For Richard was
now but too well convinced that he had no power of persuasion equal to
the task of making Dorothy see things as he saw them. The dividing
influence of imperfect opposing goods is potent as that of warring good
and evil, with this important difference, that the former is but for a
season, and will one day bind as strongly as it parted, while the latter
is essential, absolute, impassible, eternal.
To Dorothy, Richard seemed guilty of overweening arrogance and its
attendant, presumption; she could not see the form ethereal to which he
bowed. To Richard, Dorothy appeared the dupe of superstition; he could
not see the god that dwelt within the idol. To Dorothy, Richard seemed
to be one who gave the holy name of truth to nothing but the offspring
of his own vain fancy. To Richard, Dorothy appeared one who so little
loved the truth that she was ready to accept anything presented to her
as such, by those who themselves loved the word more than the spirit,
and the chrysalis of safety better than the wings of power. But it is
only for a time that any good can to the good appear evil, and at this
very moment, Nature, who in her blindness is stronger to bind than the
farthest-seeing intellect to loose, was urging him into her presence;
and the heart of Dorothy, notwithstanding her initiative in the
separation, was leaning as lovingly, as sadly after the youth she had
left alone with the defaced sun-dial, the symbol of Time's weariness.
Had they, however, been permitted to meet as they would, the natural
result of ever-renewed dissension would have been a thorough separation
in heart, no heavenly twilights of loneliness giving time for the love
which grows like the grass to recover from the scorching heat of
intellectual jar and friction.
The waning moon at length peered warily from behind a bank of cloud, and
her dim light melting through the darkness filled the night with a dream
of the day. Richard was no more of a poet or dreamer of dreams than is
any honest youth so long as love holds the bandage of custom away from
his eyes. The poets are they who all their life long contrive to see
over or through the bandage; but they would, I doubt, have but few
readers, had not nature decreed that all youths and maidens shall, for a
period, be it long or short, become aware that they too are of the race
of the singers--shall, in the journey of their life, at least pass
through the zone of song: some of them recognise it as the region of
truth, and continue to believe in it still when it seems to have
vanished from around them; others scoff as it disappears, and curse
themselves for dupes. Through this zone Richard was now passing. Hence
the moon wore to him a sorrowful face, and he felt a vague sympathy in
her regard, that of one who was herself in trouble, half the light of
her lord's countenance withdrawn. For science had not for him interfered
with the shows of things by a partial revelation of their realities. He
had not learned that the face of the moon is the face of a corpse-world;
that the sadness upon it is the sadness of utter loss; that her light
has in it no dissolved smile, is but the reflex from a lifeless mirror;
that of all the orbs we know best she can have least to do with lovers'
longings and losses, she alone having no love left in her--the cold
cinder of a quenched world. Not an out-burnt cinder, though! she needs
but to be cast again into the furnace of the sun.
As it was, Richard had gazed at her hardly for a minute when he found
the tears running down his face, and starting up, ashamed of the unmanly
weakness, hardly knew what he was doing before he found himself in the
open air. From the hall clock came the first stroke of twelve as he
closed the door behind him. It was the hour at which mother Rees had
offered him a meeting with Dorothy; but it was assuredly with no
expectation of seeing her that he turned his steps towards her dwelling.