She had, while she spoke of the “young man” thus impartially, turned her eyes from him, and they rested again on the beds of carnations. The sun had sunk behind the hill, and though the bright soft colours were unshadowed, they all lay in a different light and seemed to glow coolly in their own radiance, like jewels.
Rupert rose. His anger had passed from him. He no longer felt Mrs. Dallas to be an antagonist; but he felt her to be a stranger; and he felt himself to be a stranger. A sense of fear and loneliness and disembodiment had fallen upon him while he listened to her. He held out his hand to her. “Good-bye,” he said. “I think I must be going.”
She took his hand and looked up at him with the gaze so remote, so irrevocable. “Good-bye,” she said; “I hope to see you and Marian some day soon, perhaps.”
The words, with their quiet relapse on convention, made him feel himself in a new world. He had been thinking of final, fatal things, things dark and trenchant; she showed him compromise, continuity, commonplace good sense; and, dispossessed, bereft as he was, something in him struggled to place itself beside her in this alien atmosphere, to make itself a denizen of the new since he had forever lost the old world.
“Oh yes, I’ll tell her,” he said. And as he released her hand he found, “Thank you. I’m sure you meant it all most kindly.”
“It’s very nice of you to say so,” said Mrs. Dallas, smiling.
It was the world of convention; yet with all his bewildered groping for clues and footholds, he felt, dimly, as a glimmer before his eyes or a frail thread in his hands, that the smile was perhaps the most sincerely sweet that he had ever had from Mrs. Dallas. It was as if she saw his struggle and commended it.
III
HE walked away, up the steps, across the putting-green and out into the woods. He went slowly as he began the gradual ascent. He felt very tired, as though he had been beaten with rods, and there was in him a curious mingling of confusion and lucidity, of pain and contemplation. The present and the future were curtained with shame, uncertainty, and dismay; but the past was vivid, and, like a singular, outgrown husk, he seemed to look back at that Rupert on the veranda, so blind, so bland, so fatuous, and to see him as Mrs. Dallas had seen him.
Beyond the curtain was Marian. He knew that he went towards Marian as if towards safety and succour; yet all was opaque before his eyes, for who was it that Marian was to succour but that fatuous Rupert? and was it for such as he that he could seek support? How could he go to Marian and say, “I have been given eyes to see you as you are; help me, now, to be blind again to what I am.” No; he could not, if he were to follow his glimmer and hold his thread, seek succour from Marian.