CHAPTER VII.
REFLECTIONS.
Left alone with Lady, his mare, Richard could not help brooding--ratherthan pondering--over what the old woman had said. Not that for a momenthe contemplated as a possibility the acceptance of the witch's offer. Tocome himself into any such close relations with her as that would imply,was in repulsiveness second only to the idea of subjecting Dorothy toher influences. For something to occupy his hands, that his mind mightbe restless at will, he gave his mare a careful currying, then an extrafeed 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 healthyyouth awake, and as such consciousness is generally far from it, youthseldom counts the watches of the night. Richard soon fell fast asleep,and dreamed that his patron saint--alas for his protestantism!--appearedto him, handed him a lance headed with a single flashing diamond, andtold him to go and therewith kill the dragon. But just as he was askingthe way to the dragon's den, that he might perform his behest, the saintvanished, and feeling the lance melting away in his grasp, he graduallywoke to find it gone.
After a long talk with his father in the study, he was left to his ownresources for the remainder of the day; and as it passed and the nightdrew on, the offer of the witch kept growing upon his imagination, andhis longing to see Dorothy became stronger and stronger, until at lastit was almost too intense to be borne. He had never before known such apossession, and was more than half inclined to attribute it to the artsof mother Rees.
His father was busy in his study below, writing letters--an employmentwhich now occupied much of his time; and Richard sat alone in a chamberin the upper part of one of the many gables of the house, which he hadoccupied longer than he could remember. Its one small projectinglozenge-paned window looked towards Dorothy's home. Some years ago hehad been able to see her window, from it through a gap in the trees, byfavour of which, indeed, they had indulged in a system of communicationsby means of coloured flags--so satisfactory that Dorothy not onlypressed into the service all the old frocks she could find, but got intotrouble by cutting up one almost new for the enlargement of the somewhatlimited scope of their telegraphy. In this window he now sat, sendinghis soul through the darkness, milky with the clouded light of half anold moon, towards the ancient sun-dial, where Time stood so still thatsometimes Richard had known an hour there pass in a moment.
Never until now had he felt enmity in space: it had been hitherto ratheras a bridge to bear him to Dorothy than a gulf to divide him from herpresence; but now, through the interpenetrative power of feeling, theiralienation had affected all around as well as within him, and spaceappeared as a solid enemy, and darkness as an unfriendly enchantress,each doing what it could to separate betwixt him and the being to whomhis soul was drawn as--no, there was no AS for such drawing. Noopposition of mere circumstances could have created the feeling; it wasthe sense of an inward separation taking form outwardly. For Richard wasnow but too well convinced that he had no power of persuasion equal tothe task of making Dorothy see things as he saw them. The dividinginfluence of imperfect opposing goods is potent as that of warring goodand evil, with this important difference, that the former is but for aseason, and will one day bind as strongly as it parted, while the latteris essential, absolute, impassible, eternal.
To Dorothy, Richard seemed guilty of overweening arrogance and itsattendant, presumption; she could not see the form ethereal to which hebowed. To Richard, Dorothy appeared the dupe of superstition; he couldnot see the god that dwelt within the idol. To Dorothy, Richard seemedto be one who gave the holy name of truth to nothing but the offspringof his own vain fancy. To Richard, Dorothy appeared one who so littleloved the truth that she was ready to accept anything presented to heras 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 isonly for a time that any good can to the good appear evil, and at thisvery moment, Nature, who in her blindness is stronger to bind than thefarthest-seeing intellect to loose, was urging him into her presence;and the heart of Dorothy, notwithstanding her initiative in theseparation, was leaning as lovingly, as sadly after the youth she hadleft alone with the defaced sun-dial, the symbol of Time's weariness.Had they, however, been permitted to meet as they would, the naturalresult of ever-renewed dissension would have been a thorough separationin heart, no heavenly twilights of loneliness giving time for the lovewhich grows like the grass to recover from the scorching heat ofintellectual jar and friction.
The waning moon at length peered warily from behind a bank of cloud, andher dim light melting through the darkness filled the night with a dreamof the day. Richard was no more of a poet or dreamer of dreams than isany honest youth so long as love holds the bandage of custom away fromhis eyes. The poets are they who all their life long contrive to seeover or through the bandage; but they would, I doubt, have but fewreaders, had not nature decreed that all youths and maidens shall, for aperiod, be it long or short, become aware that they too are of the raceof the singers--shall, in the journey of their life, at least passthrough the zone of song: some of them recognise it as the region oftruth, and continue to believe in it still when it seems to havevanished from around them; others scoff as it disappears, and cursethemselves for dupes. Through this zone Richard was now passing. Hencethe moon wore to him a sorrowful face, and he felt a vague sympathy inher regard, that of one who was herself in trouble, half the light ofher lord's countenance withdrawn. For science had not for him interferedwith the shows of things by a partial revelation of their realities. Hehad 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 lighthas 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 coldcinder of a quenched world. Not an out-burnt cinder, though! she needsbut to be cast again into the furnace of the sun.
As it was, Richard had gazed at her hardly for a minute when he foundthe tears running down his face, and starting up, ashamed of the unmanlyweakness, hardly knew what he was doing before he found himself in theopen air. From the hall clock came the first stroke of twelve as heclosed the door behind him. It was the hour at which mother Rees hadoffered him a meeting with Dorothy; but it was assuredly with noexpectation of seeing her that he turned his steps towards her dwelling.