"Let's ride straight into the gold, Grantley, straight into the gold, and let the gold——"
The faint happy murmur died away in a sigh, and her head, which had been raised a moment, nestled on his shoulder again.
It had come—the supreme touch of irony which he had foreseen and dreaded. The errant wits had overleapt the stupendous gulf; they crimsoned the cold rays of the moon into the glory of summer sunset; they coloured desolate ruins with the gleaming hues of splendid youth. Her soul was again in the fairy ride, the fairy ride which had led whither? Which had led to this? Nothing that waking wits, or an ingenuity pointed by malice, might have devised, could have equalled this. She might have searched all her armoury in vain for so keen a weapon. Nay, she would have rejected this, the sharpest of all; no human being could have used it knowingly. It would have been too cruel. He listened in dull terror for a repetition of the words. They did not come again. What need? He heard them still, and a groan broke the seal of his lips.
"My God, must she do that?" he muttered to himself. "Get on, Rollo, get on!"
For now the triumph faded away, the unsubstantial pageant was no more. There was no blare of trumpets to deaden the mocking voice. The little victory stood in its contemptible dwarfishness beside the magnitude of his great defeat. That the past had been, that the present was—that was enough. The fairy ride and the struggle in the inn—they stood side by side and bade him gaze on the spectacle. Beside this it seemed as though he had suffered nothing that day and night—nothing in the thought of ridicule and shame, nothing in the dishonour of his house and home, nothing in the jealousy and anger of a forsaken man. This thing alone seemed to matter—that the past had been that, and that the present was this, and that they had been so shaped in the hands of him, the fashioner of them.
Then suddenly, with a quick twist of thought, he was bitterly sorry for Sibylla: because words and memories which come back like that, unbidden and of themselves, when the wits are wandering, must have meant a great deal and had a great place once. At such a time the mind would not throw up trifles out of an unconscious recollection. The things which have been deepest in it, which have filled—yes, and formed it—those were the things that it would throw up. In themselves they might sound wild trifles, but they were knit to great deep things, towards which they stood as representatives. They expressed nethermost truths, however idle and light they sounded. When she babbled of riding into the gold, and sank her spirit in the memory of the fairy ride, she went back all unconsciously to the great moment of her life and to its most glorious promise. She spoke of the crown of all her being.
It was strange to him, this new sorrow for Sibylla. He had never felt that yet. It was odd he should feel it now—for the woman who had forsaken her child and sought to dishonour her husband and her son. But the feeling was very strong on him. It found its first utterance in words of constrained civility. He turned his head back, saying:
"I'm afraid you're very tired?"
She answered nothing.
"I hope you're not very cold?"