It was all that her ambition had ever led her to desire, and it came to her at a time of life when her enjoyment was likely to be most keen and complete. Unless her own hand put aside the cup, it was hers to drink and to be satisfied.
And what did Alan think of it? She wondered dimly now and then if he had read it, and what he thought of the words that she had spoken out of a full heart to him and to him alone. Did he guess it? And would he ever know? She would have been answered if she could have seen him on a certain day in April, when she was in Florence and he in London town.
Alan Walcott sat in his room, on the first floor of a house between the Strand and the River Thames, reading Lettice Campion's book. He had read it once, from beginning to end, and now he was turning back to the passages which had moved him most deeply, anxious not to lose the light from a single facet of the gem that sparkled in his hands. It would have been a gem to Alan even if the world had not seen its beauty, and he was jealous of those who could lavish their praise on this woman whom he knew and worshipped, when his own hard fate compelled him to be silent.
How well he recognized her thoughts and moods in every page of the story! How familiar were many of the reflections, and even the very words which she employed! Here and there the dialogue recalled to his mind conversations which he had held with her in the happy days gone by. In one case, at least, he found that she had adopted a view of his own which he had maintained in argument against her, and which at the time she had not been willing to accept. It rejoiced him to see the mark of his influence, however slight, upon one who had so deeply impressed her image on his mind.
The novel was a revelation to him in more ways than one. It was as if she had spoken to him, for himself alone, words of wisdom and comfort and encouragement. That, indeed, was precisely what she had done—consciously and of set purpose—though he did not know it. The plot went home to his heart. When the heroine spoke to the hero he seemed to catch the very tones of her voice, to see the lips in motion, and to read in her eyes the spirit and confirmation of the words. There was nothing in the incidents of "Laurels and Thorns" which resembled his own troubles or the relations which had existed between them—except the simple fact of the mutual intellectual and moral sympathy of the two central characters. The hero had won his crown of laurels and wore his crown of thorns; the heroine, who could not love him in his triumph, had loved him in his humiliation.
Both descended in the scale of material prosperity to rise in the scale of honor and mutual respect; the glory of life was extinguished, but it gave place to the glory of love. Alan read again and again the borrowed words with which Lettice's heroine concluded her written confession of love for the man whom she had once rejected, and who thought himself precluded by his disgrace from coming to her again.
"He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee, and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
"What though the earlier grooves
That ran the laughing loves
Around thy base no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,
Scull things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
"Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?"
These were words of comfort to Alan, if only he dare take them to himself, if he dare imagine that Lettice had had him in her mind as she wrote, and had sent him that message to restore his self-respect and save him from despair.