“Why?” said he, throwing up his hands, after his fashion, with a sort of protesting groan to the powers that be. “Because I am a creature of surfaces and impressions; because, drawing my life from the great external of all, it is my doom to worship externals. We talk of our inheriting the world. Pooh! we are just an itch on the skin of this monster, whose dark internals are as remote from us as our own hated organs. Have we ever a thought of possessing our kingdom? Think with what terror we contemplate a living burial. We are the dust of contact between earth and sky; are bandied between space and matter, the dross of one or the scum of the other. Love itself is but the measure of our penetration. It is the propagation of superficies: it probes no farther: and all the time is breathing in the air like a swimmer. Are my eyes in my feet? Ask me why I hate the dark, and am attached to the light—to the brightest gnat of an hour flying within it.”
“Thank you, sir,” said I. “And that is me, I suppose?”
“That is you,” he said—“dancing on a window-pane, and wondering what fate keeps you from the garden beyond.”
“And you,” I said, “are the spider lurking in the window-corner, n’est ce pas, and wondering what fate keeps you from devouring me. Well, you are very complimentary; but, for my part, I would rather have an hour’s dancing on the surface than possess all the world that’s under.”
“Ay,” he answered, “and that’s why I covet you.”
Now, was he not an inexplicable creature, and, it must be said, a depressing? Moreover, for all his advocacy of my cause, I could never quite reconcile him to my view of madam.
“Remember the day of the picture,” he would say; “and how she rebuked us all by her attitude. If I testify to your martyrdom, Diana, I must testify to hers that preceded it.”
“She is welcome to the palm,” I cried. “And may she live long to flaunt her conquest.”
He did not answer; and so letting his dissent pass by default, put a bar between us that was never quite surmounted.
In the meanwhile, day followed day, and the frost held, and I was cold and ennuyée; and still he delayed our flight on the score of peril. I had come but poorly clad for the test, and I cried and shivered much in our dismal refuge, where what fire we could afford must be kept low from dread of the smoke betraying us. Present food we had, and some wine that helped a little to comfort our dejection; and on the Friday he was due, tramping fourteen miles thither and back over the hills, to claim his fresh dole of the tree above Wellcot, where faithful Patty—who was in his confidence as to his retreat, and the means towards my salvation he hoped to make of it—was wont to conceal it. Dear darling! How I longed to convey her a message; but he would not hear of it.