Now, however, it was very different; he felt himself wholly preoccupied by the thought of Maud; and he found himself looking into the secret of love, as a man might gaze from a hill-top into a chasm where the rocky ridges plunged into mist, doubting of his way, and mistrusting his own strength to pursue the journey. He did not know what the quality of his love was; he recognised an intense kind of passion, but when he looked beyond that, and imagined himself wedded to Maud, what was the emotion that would survive the accomplishment of his desires? Would he find himself longing for the old, comfortable, isolated life again? did he wish his life to be inextricably intertwined with the life of another? He was not sure. He had a dread of having to concede an absolute intimacy, he wished to give only as much as he chose; and then, too, he told himself that he was too old to marry so young a girl, and that she would be happier if she could find a more equal partner for her life. Yet even so the thought of yielding her to another sickened him. He believed that she had been attracted by Guthrie, and that he had but to hold his hand and keep his distance, and the relation might broaden into marriage. He wondered if love could begin so, so easily and simply. He would like to have believed it could not, yet it was just so that love did begin! And then, too, he did not know what was the nature of Maud's feelings to himself. He thought that she had been attracted to him, but in a sisterly sort of way; that he had come across her when she was feeling cramped and dissatisfied, and that a friendship with him had seemed to offer her a chance of expansion and interest.
He often thought of telling the whole story to his aunt; but like many people who seem extraordinarily frank about their feelings and fancies, and speak easily even of their emotions, he found himself condemned to silence about any emotion or experience that had any serious or tragic quality. Most people would have thought him communicative, and even lacking in reticence. But he knew in himself that it was not so; he could speak of his intimate ideas very readily upon slight acquaintance, because they were not to him matters of deep feeling; but the moment that they really moved him, he felt absolutely dumb and tongue-tied.
He established himself at Windlow, and became at once aware that his aunt perceived that there was something amiss. She gave him opportunities of speaking to her, but he could not take them. He shrank with a painful dumbness from displaying his secret wound. It seemed to him undignified and humiliating to confess his weakness. He hoped vaguely that the situation would solve itself, and spare him the necessity of a confession.
He tried to occupy himself in his book, but in vain. Now that he was confronted with a real and urgent dilemma, the origins of religion seemed to him to have no meaning or interest. He did not feel that they had any bearing whatever upon life; and his pain seemed to infect all his perceptions. The quality of beauty in common things, the hill-shapes, the colour of field and wood, the lights of dawn and eve, the sailing cloud, the tints of weathered stone, the old house in its embowered garden, with the pure green lines of the down above, had no charm or significance for him any more. Again and again he said to himself, "How beautiful that would be, if I could but feel it to be so!" He saw, as clearly and critically as ever, the pleasant forms and hues and groupings of things, but it was dull and savourless, while all the attractive ideas that sprang up like flowers in his mind, the happy trains of thought, in which some single fancy ramified and extended itself into unsuspected combinations and connections, these all seemed hardly worth recognising or pursuing. He found himself listless and distracted, just able by an effort to talk, to listen, to exchange thoughts, but utterly without any zest or energy.
Jack had gone off for a short visit, and Howard was thus left mostly alone. He went once or twice to the Vicarage, but found Mr. Sandys an unmixed trial; there seemed something wholly puerile about his absurd energies and activities. The only boon of his society was that he expected no reply to his soliloquies. Maud was there too, a distant graceful figure; but she, too, seemed to have withdrawn into her own thoughts, and their talk was mostly formal. Yet he was painfully and acutely conscious of her presence. She, too, seemed to be clouded and sad. He found himself unable to talk to her unconstrainedly. He could only dumbly watch her; she appeared to avert her eyes from him; and yet he drew from these meetings an infinite series of pictures, which were as if engraved upon his brain. She became for him in these days like a lily drooping in a shadowed place and in a thunderous air; something fading away mutely and sorrowfully, like the old figure of Mariana in the Grange, looking wearily through listless hours for something which had once beckoned to her with a radiant gesture, but which did not return. There were brighter hours, when in the hot July days a little peace fell on him, a little sense of the fragrance and beauty of the world. He took to long and solitary walks on the down in search of bodily fatigue. There was one day in particular which he long remembered, when he had gone up to the camp, and sate in the shade of the thicket on the crisp turf, looking out over the valley, unutterably quiet and peaceful in the hot air. The trees were breathlessly still; the hamlet roofs peeped out above the orchards, the hot air quivered on the down. There were little figures far below moving about the fields. It all looked lost in a sweetness of serene repose; and the thoughts that had troubled him rose with a bitter poignancy, that was almost a physical pain. The contrast between the high summer, the rich life of herb and tree, and his own weary and arid thoughts, fell on him like a flash. Would it not be better to die, to close one's eyes upon it all, to sink into silence, than thus to register the awful conflict of will and passion with the tranquil life that could not surrender its dreams of peace? What did he need and desire? He could not tell; he felt almost a hatred of the slender, quiet girl, with her sweet look, her delicate hands, her noiseless movements. She had made no claim, she did not come in radiant triumph, with impressive gestures and strong commanding influences into his life; she had not even cried out passionately, demanded love, displayed an urgent need; there had been nothing either tragic or imperious, nothing that called for instant solution; she was just a girl, sweet, wayward, anxious-minded, living a trivial, simple, sheltered life. What had given her this awful power over him, which seemed to have rent and shattered all his tranquil contentment, and yet had offered no splendid opportunity, claimed no all-absorbing devotion, no magnificent sacrifice? It was a sort of monstrous spell, a magical enchantment, which had thus made havoc of all his plans and gentle schemes. Life, he felt, could never be the same for him again; he was in the grip of a power that made light of human arrangements. The old books were full of it; they had spoken of some hectic mystery, that seized upon warriors and sages alike, wasted their strength, broke their energies, led them into crime and sorrow. He had always rather despised the pale and hollow-eyed lovers of the old songs, and thought of them as he might think of men indulging in a baneful drug which filched away all manful prowess and vigour. It was like La Belle Dame sans merci after all, the slender faring child, whose kiss in the dim grotto had left the warrior 'alone and palely loitering,' burdened with sad thoughts in the wintry land. And yet he could not withstand it. He could see the reasonable and sensible course, a placid friendship, a long life full of small duties and quiet labours;—and then the thought of Maud would come across him, with her shining hair, her clear eyes, holding a book, as he had seen her last in the Vicarage, in her delicate hands, and looking out into the garden with that troubled inscrutable look; and all the prudent considerations fell and tumbled together like a house of cards, and he felt as though he must go straight to her and fall before her, and ask her to give him a gift the very nature of which he did not know, her girlish self, her lightly-ranging mind, her tiny cares and anxieties, her virginal heart—for what purpose? he did not know; just to be with her, to clasp her close, to hear her voice, to look into her eyes, to discourse with her some hidden secret of love. A faint sense of some infinite beauty and nearness came over him which, if he could win it, would put the whole of life into a different plane. Not a friendly combination, but an absolute openness and nakedness of soul, nothing hidden, nothing kept back, everything confessed and admitted, a passing of two streams of life into one.
XVIII
THE PICNIC
Jack arrived at Windlow in due course, and brought with him Guthrie to stay. Howard thought, and was ashamed of thinking, that Jack had some scheme on foot; and the arrival of Guthrie was embarrassing to him, as likely to complicate an already too complicated situation.
A plan was made for a luncheon picnic on the hill. There was a tower on the highest eminence of the down, some five miles away, a folly built by some wealthy squire among woodlands, and commanding wide views; it was possible to drive to a village at the foot, and to put up vehicles at a country inn; and it was proposed that they should take luncheon up to the tower, and eat it there. The Sandys party were to drive there, and Howard was to drive over with Miss Merry and meet them. Howard did not at all relish the prospect. He had a torturing desire for the presence of Maud, and yet he seemed unable to establish any communication with her; and he felt that the liveliness of the young men would reduce him to a condition of amiable ineffectiveness which would make him, as Marie Bashkirtseff naively said, hardly worth seeing. However, there was no way out, and on a delicious July morning, with soft sunlight everywhere, and great white clouds floating in a sky of turquoise blue, Howard and Miss Merry started from Windlow. The little lady was full of decorous glee, and her mirth, like a working cauldron, threw all her high-minded tastes to the surface. She asked Howard's opinion about quite a number of literary masterpieces, and she ingenuously gave utterance to her meek and joyful views of life, the privileges she enjoyed, and the inspiration which she derived from the ethical views of Robert Browning. Howard found himself wondering why it was all so dreadfully uninteresting and devoid of charm; he asked himself whether, if the little spinster had been personally more attractive, her optimistic chirpings would have seemed to have more significance. Miss Merry had a perfectly definite view of life, and she made life into a distinct success; she was a happy woman, sustained by an abundance of meek enthusiasm. She accepted everything that happened to her, whether good or evil, with the same eager interest. Suffering, according to Miss Merry, had an educative quality, and life was haunted for her by echoes of excellent literature, accurately remembered. But Howard had a feeling that one must not swallow life quite so uncritically, that there ought somehow to be more discrimination; and Miss Merry's eager adoration of everything and everybody reduced him to a flatness which he found it difficult to conceal. He could not think what was the matter with her views. She revelled in what she called problems, and the more incomplete that anything appeared, the more certain was Miss Merry of ultimate perfection. There did not seem any room for humanity, with its varying moods, in her outlook; and yet Howard had the grace to be ashamed of his own sullen dreariness, which certainly did not appear to lend any dignity to life. But he had not the heart to spoil the little lady's pleasure, and engaged in small talk upon moderately abstract topics with courteous industry. "Of course," said his companion confidingly, "all that I do is on a very small scale, but I think that the quality of it is what matters—the quality of one's ideal, I mean." Howard murmuringly assented. "I have sometimes even wished," she went on, "that I had some real trouble of my own—that seems foolish to you, no doubt, because my life is such an easy one—but I do feel that my happiness rather cuts me off from other people—and I don't want to be cut off from other people; I desire to know how and why they suffer."