But he did not regard with any present sentiment but that of anger the woman who had thus been the means to his proper understanding of his own personal insignificance. For her sex, indeed, he had no natural liking but that negatively conveyed in a sort of chivalrous contempt for its inconsequence (whereby—though he did not know it—he may have offered himself an unconscious Bertram to a score of Helenas). Now, to find his austere particular self made the object of a sacrifice of utter truth and decency, both alarmed and disgusted him. The very jar of the discovery tumbled him from cloud to earth. Yet, be it said, if it brought him with a run from his removed heights, he was to fall into that garden of the world where the loves, their thighs yellow with pollen, flutter from flower to flower.
For by-and-by, in the very glow and fever of his indignation, he startled to sudden consciousness of the fact that it was the implied insult to his honesty, rather than that actual one to his sense of modesty, that most offended him; that his heart was indulging a little rebellious memory of a late dream, it appeared, that was full of a strange pressure of tenderness. He caught himself sharply from the weakness; yet it would recur. He began to question the propriety of his attitude towards women generally. Serenely self-centred, perhaps he had never realised the necessity of being, in a world of artificiality, other than himself. Now he faintly gathered how poor a policy of virtue might be implied thereby—how, under certain conditions, Virtue might be held its own justification for assuming an alias.
And thereat came the first reaction in a pretty series of moral rallies and relapses.
“Bah!” he muttered, “the girl is a little lying cocotte—a Lamia from whose snares I am fortunate to have escaped without a wound.”
In the meantime his heart turned towards home with a strange heat of yearning—towards his England of stolid factions and sober, unemotional sympathies; of regulated hate and the liberal schooling of love. He had submitted himself to much physical and mental suffering in order to the acquirement of a right understanding of men; and at the last a woman had upset and scattered his classified collection of principles with a whisk of her skirt. He felt it was useless to attempt to rearrange his specimens unless in an atmosphere not inimical to sobriety.
“I will go home,” he thought, as he stepped rapidly forward. “And at any rate I am here at length out of the wood;” and straightway, poor rogue, he fell into a second ambush by the roadside.
For, coming to a sudden turn in his path when he was breaking from the copses a half mile out of the village, he was suddenly aware of a shrill cackle of vituperation, of such particular import to him at the present crisis as to constrain him to stop where he was and listen.
“Oh, çà, Valentin—çà-çà-çà!” hooted a booby voice. “A twist, and thou hast secured it! Oh, çà! bring it away and we will look.”
“Let go!” panted another voice, in a heat of jeering violence. “I will have it, I say!”
Then Ned heard Théroigne, pleading and tearful—