(1)
The stone-rimmed basin in the old Physic Garden, fringed with a few yellowing reeds, held water that seemed as black as night, water that reflected, clear and blacker still, the bare interlaced boughs of a great tree beside it. And in this dark net, like a silver fish entangled in waterweeds, lay the shining half-moon, brilliant already, though it was only half-past four of a December afternoon. It was an afternoon, too, of extraordinary radiance, as if to mark that herald day of Christmas when the longing of the Church, no more to be suppressed, bursts through the monitory thoughts of Advent, in pure joy and expectation, with the first of the great antiphons of Magnificat, and hails as the Eternal Wisdom the Child so soon to come.
But there was nothing of this in the heart of the man who sat, his head in his hands, on a seat by the little pond. Reading, an hour ago, in his lodgings, the letter which he had just returned from Northamptonshire to find, he had felt that he must get out, away—anywhere—and pushing up the narrow, screaming High Street of St. Thomas's, past the Castle keep, had come, through St. Ebbe's, full on to the front of Christ Church, looking, in the golden light, like the battlements of an ethereal city. But he had gone blindly forward, and found himself, at last, in the old walled garden which had seen so many generations of flower and seed.
Horatia's letter had been quite ordinary, speaking of the child, of his future, the necessity of her care, the joy that he was to her. But, of course, she understood ... And three years ago he would willingly have died for her; now he could not even live for her! As for his own letter of last week, he could not think how he had ever brought himself to write it—and yet were it to write again, he must have said the same. He belonged, now, body and soul, to a force whose demands on some lives were so exorbitant as to come into mortal conflict even with the best and holiest human claims.
He ought never to have gone to Compton; he ought to have left Oxford, at whatever cost of unkindness. He could not say that it had been only pain to go and see her, and since he could not even now accuse himself of having done or said anything amiss, it must have been that his pleasure was visible.... He felt an outcast, a pariah. How deeply he had sinned against God he could not fathom, but he had sinned, it seemed to him irretrievably, against the code in which he had been brought up. For if he was a Christian and a priest he was a gentleman, too ... or had been.
The thought of Dormer came into his mind as he sat there. Dormer would understand—he would despise him, no doubt, but he would understand. He could never tell him. He was sitting among his books in that well-known room scarcely a quarter of a mile away, yet a thousand miles might be between them. He could never tell him, because of Horatia. Besides, he had lost the habit of close intercourse.
And in his misery he did not know that Dormer was at that moment standing on the other side of the basin, looking at him, across the drowned moon, with the profoundest tenderness, wondering whether he could speak to him now. Only, after a while, he was conscious of someone on the seat beside him, and felt an arm laid across his shoulders.
"Tristram, Tristram, don't sit here in the cold like this.... Come to my rooms.... I know all about it—she has told me; I have seen her and she wants me to tell you that she understands.... You must not take it so hardly; it is all quite simple, and ... and wonderful, it seems to me.... My dear, dear fellow, I don't want to pester you, but if you would only come away..." Dormer's voice, ordinarily so cool and restrained, broke suddenly.
There was a silence; Tristram did not move. A London coach rolled over the bridge; the chimes of Magdalen struck a quarter to five. Dormer slowly took away his arm.
And at that Tristram removed one of his hands from his face, and put it out gropingly towards him.