Week after week, month after month, he had driven every day within sight of the blue smoke that curled above the trees at “Solitude,” but never even for an instant checked his horse to gaze longingly towards the Eden whence he had voluntarily exiled himself.
There were hours when his heart ached for the sight of that white face he had loved so madly, and the sound of the mournfully sweet voice,—and his hand trembled at the recollection of the soft, cold, snowy fingers, that once thrilled his palms; but he treated these utterances of his heart as mercilessly as the hunter who cheers his dogs in the chase where the death-cry of the victim rings above bark and halloo.
No wall of division, no sea of separation, would have proved so effectual, so insurmountable, as his own firm resolve that his earthly path should never cross that of one whom God’s statutes had set apart until death annulled the decree. In this torturing ordeal he was strengthened by the conviction that he alone suffered for his folly,—that Mrs. Carlyle was a stranger to feelings that robbed him of sleep, and clouded his days,—that the heaving tide of his devoted love 442 had broken against her frozen heart as idly as the surges of the sea that die in foam upon the dreary, mysterious ruins of the Serapeon at Pozzuoli.
In the silent watches of the night, as he pondered the brief, beautiful vision that had so completely fascinated him, he reverently thanked God that the woman he loved had never reciprocated his affection, and was not sitting in the ashes of desolation, mourning his absence. Striving to interest himself more and more in Stanley and Jessie, who had become inordinately fond of him, his thoughts continually reverted to Salome, and that subtle sympathy which springs from the “fellow-being,” that makes us “wondrous kind” to those whose pangs are fierce as ours, began faintly and shyly, but surely, to assert itself. A shadowy, intangible self-reproach brooded like a phantom over his generous heart, when, amidst the uncertainty that seemed to overhang the orphan’s fate, he remembered the numberless manifestations of almost idolatrous affection which he had coldly repulsed.
In the earnest interest that day by day deepened in the absent girl, there was no pitiable vanity, no inflated self-love, but a stern realization of the anguish and humiliation that must now be her portion, and a magnanimous eagerness to endeavor to cheer a heart whose severest woes had sprung from his indifference.
More than a year had elapsed, and no letter had ever reached him,—not even a message in her two brief epistles to Stanley, and Dr. Grey missed the bright, perverse element that no longer thwarted him at every turn.
He longed to see the proud, girlish face, with its flashing eyes, and red lips, and the haughty toss of the large, handsome head; and the angry tones of her voice would have been welcome sounds in the house where she had so long tyrannized. To-day, as Ulpian Grey sat in his own little sitting-room, his eyes were fixed on a copy of Rembrandt’s Nicholas Tulp, which hung over the mantelpiece; but the mysteries of anatomy no longer riveted his attention, and his thoughts were busy with memories of a fond though wayward girl, 443 whom his indifference had driven to foreign lands,—to unknown and fearful perils.
Through the windows stole the breath of Salome’s violets, and the sweet, spicy odor of the Belgian honeysuckle that she had planted and twined around the mossy columns that supported the gallery; and with a sigh he closed his eyes, shut out the anatomy of flesh, and began the dissection of emotions.
Could Salome’s radiant face brighten his home, and win his heart from its devouring regret? Would it be possible for him to give her the place whence he had ejected Mrs. Carlyle? Could he ever persuade himself to call that fair, passionate young thing, that capricious, obstinate, maliciously perverse girl,—his wife?
Involuntarily he frowned, for while pity pleaded for the refugee from home and happiness, the man’s honest nature scouted all shams, and he acknowledged to himself that he could never feel the need of her lips or hands,—could never insult her womanhood, or degrade his own nature, by folding to his heart one whose touch possessed no magnetism, whose presence exerted no spell over his home.