would drink from it after him (Anne was excessively fastidious). To his intense satisfaction, she drank, draining the last drop. They went back together to their tree. On the way he stopped to gather wild hyacinths for her. He gathered slowly, in a grave and happy passion of preoccupation. Anne stood erect in the path and watched him, and laughed the girl's laugh that he longed to hear. It was as if she saw him for the first time through Edith's eyes, with so tender an intelligence did she take in his attitude, the absurd, the infantile intentness of his stooping figure, the still more absurdly infantile emotion of his hands. It was the very same attitude which had melted Edith, that unhappy day when they had watched him as he walked disconsolate in the garden, and she, his wife, had hardened her heart against him. She remembered Edith's words to her not two hours ago: "If you could only see how unspeakably sacred the human part of us is, and how pathetic." Surely she saw. The deep feeling and enchantment of the woods was upon her. He was sacred to her; and for pathos, it seemed to her that there was poured upon his stooping body all the pathos of all the living creatures of God. She saw deeper. In the illumination that rested on him there, she saw the significance of that carelessness, that happiness of his which had once troubled her. It was simply that his experience, his detestable experience, had had no power to harm his soul. Through it all he had preserved, or, by some miracle of God, recovered an incorruptible innocence. She said to herself: "Why should I not love him? His heart must be as pure as the heart of that little blessed child." The warning voice of the wisdom she had learnt from him whispered: "And it rests with you to keep him so." He led her to her tree, where she seated herself regally as before. He poured his sheaves of hyacinths as tribute into her lap. As his hands touched hers her cold face flushed again and softened. He stretched himself beside her and love stirred in her heart, unforbidden, as in a happy dream. He watched the movements of her delicate fingers as they played with the tangled hyacinth bells. Her hands were wet with the thick streaming juice of the torn stalks; she stretched them out to him helplessly. He knelt before her, and spread his handkerchief on his knees, and took her hands and wiped them. She let them rest in his for a moment, and, with a low, panting cry, he bowed his head and covered them with kisses. At his cry her lips parted. And as her soul had called to him across the spiritual ramparts, so her eyes said to him: "Come"; and he knew that with all her body and her soul she yearned to him and consented. He held her tight by the wrists and drew her to him; and she laid her arms lightly on his neck and kissed him. "I'm glad now," she whispered, "that Edith didn't tell She knew you. Oh, my dear, she knew." And to herself she said proudly: "It rests with me." me. IT BOOK II CHAPTER XI T was October, five months after Anne's birthday. She was not to know again the mood which determined her complete surrender. Supreme moods can never be recaptured or repeated. The passion that inspires them is unique, self-sacrificial, immortal only through fruition; doomed to pass and perish in its exaltation. She would know tenderness, but never just that tenderness; gladness, but never that gladness; peace, but never the peace that possessed her in the woods at Westleydale. The new soul in her moved steadily, to a rhythm which lacked the diviner thrill of the impulse which had given it birth. It was but seldom that the moment revived in memory. If Anne had accounted to herself for that day, she would have said that they had taken the nine-fifty train to Westleydale, that they had had a nice luncheon, that the weather was exceptionally fine, and that well, yes, certainly, that day had been the beginning of their entirely satisfactory relations. Anne's mind had a tendency to lapse into the commonplace when not greatly stirred. Happily for her, she had a refuge from it in her communion with the Unseen. Only at times was she conscious of a certain foiled expectancy. For the greater while it seemed to her that she had attained an indestructible spiritual content. |