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.