He was going; but she pressed upon him, panting and desperate.
“Don’t leave me like this! There—into the bedroom, till they are gone! Monsieur, for pity’s sake! You put too much upon me. I will explain. For God’s sake, monsieur!”
He drove past her—hurried down the passage. As he neared the door, he saw the light obscured by a couple of entering figures—a complacent-smiling curé, who ushered in a fashionable pilgrim exhaling musk and tinkling with gewgaws.
“Exortum est in tenebris lumen rectis,” murmured the priest as he gave place with a slight bow.
“Exactly so,” said Ned, and made his way to the road.
There he stood a moment, blinking and gulping down the fresh spring air.
CHAPTER XVII.
Mr Murk walked straight from the lodge of the chateau out of the village, stopping only on his way to take up his knapsack at the “Landlust.” He moved, very haughty and inflexible, with a high soul of offence at the attempt manifested to subject him to the charge of collusion in what he considered a particularly unpleasant species of fraud. It was that, more than the outrage to his continent self-respect, that angered and insulted him—that he could under any circumstances be deemed approachable by imposture, even though it should solicit in ravishing guise. He had never as yet, indeed, through any phases of fortune, regarded himself as other than a philosophic alien to his race; a disinterested spectator of its wars of creeds and senses, perched out of the battle on a little cloudy eminence of spiritual reserve, whence it was his humour to analyse the details of the contest for the gratifying of a curious intellectual cosmopolitanism. And even when for nearer view of some party struggle he had descended—or condescended—so far as that he had felt upon his face the very bloody sprinkle of the strife, he had chosen to read, in the emotions excited in his breast, an instinctive revolt against the injustice of pain, rather than a sympathy with the sufferings of which he was witness.
Now, however, he seemed to have realised in a moment by what common means Nature is able to impeach this treason of aloofness. He had held himself a thing altogether apart in that conflict of blurred, indefinite forms. He had been like a spectator watching an illuminated sheet at an entertainment, when (to adopt a modern image) there had sounded in an instant the click of the cinematograph snapping the blur into focus, and, lo! he beheld his own figure active amongst the crowd, a constituent atom travelling through or with it, a mean, small condition of its gregariousness—repellent, attractive, infinitesimally influential, according to the common degree of his kind. Holding his soul, as he fancied, veracious and remote, he had seen it magnetic, in its supposed isolation, to another that, in its essential guile, in its infirmity and untruth, would seem to be his spirit’s actual antithesis, yet whose destinies, rebel as he might, must henceforth for evermore be associated with his. He was no amateur counsel to a recording angel, in fact, but just a human organism subject to the influences of neighbour temperaments.
Now, the considerable but lesser pang in this shock to his pride of solitariness was felt in the realisation of his impotence to claim exemption from the ordinary vulgar taxes imposed by the gods upon vulgar animal instincts. He must be sought if he would not seek; nor could he by any means escape the penalties of his manly attributes. He was a thing of desire; therefore he represented the one moiety of the race to which he would have fain considered himself an alien.