“Naturally, poor Cantrip will relapse. And he will hammer wife and nails once more, and as energetically as ever. But this is immaterial. The principle, my good young people, you are both intelligent enough to see at once, is firmly established. In another year the face of Bindon will have changed. Beldam will scold no more nor maiden mope. You yourself, David—we should have no more of these heavy sighs, if——”
Here Ellinor broke in, rising and holding out the letter.
“Cousin David, I quite forgot—the post brought this for you and I promised to give it.”
“A letter,” said Sir David. He took it from her hand and placed it on the stone parapet. “It is too dark to read it now.” She fancied his voice was troubled, and immediately there grew upon her an inexplicable jealous desire that the letter should be opened in her presence, that she might gain some hint of its contents.
“I will bring out a light,” she said and flew upon her errand, returning presently with a little silver lantern from the observatory. She placed it on the ledge; and from the three glass sides its light threw cross shaped beams, one uselessly into the dark space, one upon the rough stone and the letter, one upon her own bending face, pale and eager, with aureole of disordered hair.
From the darkness Sir David looked at her face first: and it was as if the revealing light had shot into the mists of his own heart.
The passion of love comes to men from so many different paths that to each individual it may be said to come in a new guise. To no one does it come as an invited guest. It may be the chance meeting, the love at first sight—“she never loved at all who loved not at first sight.” But Shakespeare knew better than to advance this as an axiom. ’Tis but the insolent phrase on the lover’s mouth who deems his own passion the only true one, the model for the world. Some, on the other hand, find with amazement that long, long already, in some sweet and familiar shape, love has been with them and they knew it not. They have entertained an angel unawares; and suddenly, it may be on a trivial occasion, the veil has been lifted and the heavenly countenance revealed. Others, like the poor man in the fable, take the treacherous thing to the warmth of their bosom in all trustfulness and only by the sting of it as it uncoils know that they have been struck to the heart. Others, again, as unfortunate, bolt their inhospitable doors upon the wayfarer and perhaps, as they sit by a lonely hearth, never know that it was love that knocked and went its way, to pass the desolate house no more.
To Sir David Cheveral, whose hot and hopeful youth had been betrayed by life, this sudden apprehension of love in his set manhood came, not in sweetness nor yet in pain, but in a bewildering upheaval of all things ordered—as an earthquake flinging up new heights and baring unknown depths in the staid familiar landscape; as a flash of light—“the light that never was on sea or land,” after which nothing ever could look the same again.
It may, in one sense, be true that the man of pleasure is an easier prey to his feelings than he who in asceticism spends his days feeding the spirit at the expense of the flesh; but it is true only because the former man is weak, not because his passion is strong. By so much as the deep river that has been driven to course between its own silent banks is more mighty than the shallow waters that expand themselves in a hundred noisy channels, by so much is the passion of the recluse a thing more irresistible, more terrible to reckon with than the bubble obsession of the self indulgent.
But he who outrages Nature by excess in other direction, by Nature herself is punished. The recluse of Bindon was now to grapple with the avenging strength of his denied manhood. By the leaping of his blood and the tremor of his being, by the joy of his heart, which his instinctive sudden resistance turned into as fierce an anguish, by the heat that rushed to his brow, he knew at last that love was upon him; and he knew that, were he to resist love in obedience to so many unspoken vows, victory would be more bitter than death.