—Tennyson (Maud).
The moon, fulfilling its lower summer circuit, had moved already a considerable span upon the wondrous measure that, to the watcher, seems imperceptibly slow, and yet, like the passing of the hour, asserts itself with such irrevocable swiftness. The night had deepened from pale sapphire to dark amethyst. Below, all around, the great woods at Bindon, silver-crested southwards, whispered; and the light airs that stirred them gathered sweets from the rose-gardens and spices from the Herbary before reaching the two on their tower. These airs, Ellinor thought, must pass on their way again, heavy with the sighs of her heart!
“On such a night,” what might not have been this meeting! With life all before them yet, what perversity was it to spend this silvery hour in the story of old and ugly wrongs; when God had made a heaven so fair, an earth so scented and a woman’s heart so true, to see all with distorted vision and consort with the remembrance of injury until the voice of no better comrade could make itself heard!
He told her with how high a heart he had set forth on life; and indeed she well remembered his gallant figure in the pride of youth, his lofty idealism and his fine intolerant scorn. She remembered, too, the witty mocking countenance, the cold green eye, the dark, auburn head of the Master of Lochore.—Lochore! Ellinor had instinctively dreaded and hated him. But with David he had taken the lead in everything; the relentless strength of the elder man’s nature had transformed him into a kind of hero for the younger, at a time when student-brains are peopled with ideals of the highest pitch in all things, be it love or sport, war or friendship. David’s reflective temperament was fascinated by a spirit of essential joyousness and fierceness.—In but a few words David touched on his past romantic affection for this Cosmo Lochore. It was with a sneer, as if the ghost of his own green youth had risen up before him and he could have withered it for his contemptible folly.
“Then,” he went on, “came the long-promised month on the moors, at the edge of the Lochore Forest. Cosmo, in his kilt, at early dawn ... to see his crest of hair and his eagle feather flame in the first shaft of light! I don’t suppose that any feelings can ever be quite so pure, so strong, so ideal, as this sort of boy adoration for the man. Ideal!” repeated David, and struck with his buckled shoe against a fernlet that had found a home for itself between two stones of the tower flooring and cast a little shadow in the moonlight.
Ellinor saw how he set his foot upon it, and thought the action symbolic.
“Ideal!” cried he, gibing at himself. “That is my curse, you see, that I cannot even now, accept life as it is! Fie! How ugly is all reality to me! What is in the doom of corruption that we carry in the flesh compared to the doom of corruption in the spirit? No! Rather this stone at my feet and the stars above my head!” He lifted, as he spoke, his face towards the sky; but it caught now no reflection of serenity, only light upon its own trouble. “I was an idealiser in friendship—how much more when it came to love!”
Impassively as she held herself, she could not control a slight start, a quick look at him. He was gazing beyond her, as if out there, in the night, the phantom of his first lost love had arisen before him. And when he went on speaking after a pause, it was as if he were addressing not Ellinor, but her—the Unknown—who had brought short joy and lasting sorrow into his life. Oh! Ellinor had been a fool not to have known how deep it had gone with him, since, after all these long years his every word, every action, bore witness to it! And yet, as she now looked at his face, she told herself she had not known it.
“A little creature—a kind of sprite, as light as a little brown bird, as lissom, as hardy as a heather blossom!”
Thus, from the unknown past, Ellinor’s rival rose before her: to be light, to be little, to be swift and lissom and brown—that was the way into his heart!... In every inch of her own splendid frame the listening woman felt great and massive, marble-white and still.