“In Heaven’s name, spare me any more of this! My God, man, do you not think I feel it at least as much as you? If she had grown into your heart, how had it been with mine?”
“Forgive me,” interposed the other in alarm at his companion’s vehemence. (Was this the old brain-sick David back again, was the old story of Bindon House to begin once more?) “Forgive me,” he repeated. “I had no idea....”
“No idea!” The rider looked down upon his companion with a bitter smile. “And did I not hear you boast, but a moment ago, that you could read the human countenance? No idea that I loved Ellinor! Why, man, have I not loved her since the first instant these eyes beheld her, ah, me, nearly a year ago! with the lamplight shining on her golden head! And her blue eyes—her blue eyes!”
With the inexplicable shyness of the man for his fellow-human, the parson almost recoiled from the vision of passion unexpectedly laid bare before him. But like those mountain-chasms filled with mist to the wayfarer’s eye, save when a rare and sudden gust of wind allows their depth to be fathomed for a moment, the deeps of Sir David’s heart were swiftly veiled again. He resumed the thread of his thought, in a composed manner, though somewhat dreamily, as if speaking to himself rather than to a listener:
“I came down that first night from my tower, I remember, eyes and mind dazed by the glory of that new star which I was so inordinately elated at having been the first to see, and I thought,” with a little laugh at once tender and exceedingly melancholy, “that another miracle—I was in the mood for miracles—had been wrought for me, and that the star in the firmament had taken living shape on earth!”
“In the name of goodness, what prevented you from telling her so then!” exclaimed the parson with sudden testiness. “Aye, David, and sparing us all this sorrow? You could have won her easily enough.”
“Because I was mad, I suppose. Oh, my dear old friend, never protest! I am sane again now, sane enough at least to know how mad I have been—call it by what euphemistic name you like. I might have won her, but did not know myself, could not trust myself. I believed I had done with human love, you know. I had consecrated myself to worlds beyond this one. She came to call me down from my unnatural life. She spoke to me, with sweet human voice, of lovely human things; she laid her tender hand on mine. It was my madness that I dulled my ears, that I made no answer to her touch. And yet there was happiness, ah, God, what happiness, in it all! Then came that last strange night! What happened to me I cannot recall. But ever since then I have been so sane, that, before God, I could almost wish the old folly back now that I have lost all. The curse of common sense is on me: I can no longer lose myself in visions on my tower. There stands Bindon, my house, my desolate house, an empty shell, full of echoes. Before me lies a desolate, empty life, full of memories. Everything, everything speaks of her, calls for her! Nothing can ever be sweet to me for the want of her. Once she said to me: ‘David, David, why is your heart empty, why are there no children round your knee!’ And I made answer: ‘Never can such things be for me.’ And then she wept over me.... You are right, sir, I might have won her. Sometimes, reason notwithstanding, under the pulse of vague, elusive memories I cannot fix, I think that in spite of all she loved me.”
The parson started again and flung an apprehensive glance at the speaker. The latter noted it; and the cold desolation of his voice changed for a light tone of irony that was somehow quite as melancholy:
“But never fear, dear sir, this is no return of madness. Who can fathom a woman’s heart? All lies shrouded in mystery and, as you say, we know but one thing:—that we have lost her!”
“Strange is it not?” began David once more, “that I should remember so clearly every word she ever said to me, though my poor brain was so sick at the time! But indeed it seems to me as if, until the moment when first a mantle of gorgeous dream enwrapt me round and then a blank, a blessed blank fell on me and in it I lost as in a great sea all the miserable wreckage of my wasted life—it seems to me, I say, as if my illness was that I remembered too much, too constantly, too vividly, for mental health. And now I remember still, yet not as of old with torture of shame and fury, but as if memories of her were all that life has left of sweetness.” He reined in his horse, and, gazing straight before him as at the rift of blue between the heavy clouds, went on still dreamily: “Strange, does it not seem to you? Strange even to myself! And I who could not trust her, when her every look and smile was for me, now I trust her, although, standing before us all, she would not defend her woman’s fame by one word.”