A look that few people ever saw came into Charles Dormer's eyes. He leant forward on the table, his elbows on his scattered manuscripts. "Tristram," he said earnestly, "you know that you have always had my good wishes, and you have them still. You are so obviously cut out for the charities and the humanities...." He stopped and looked down at his papers. "I don't think I am being a sawney about you, even when I want you to be happy."
Tristram was at the door, his hand on the handle. His voice came jerkily. "I am afraid your good wishes are of no use to me now ... Yes, I wanted you to know, but I can't tell you, after all ... I only hope I shall do what is right."
He was gone, and Dormer, half-risen from his chair, was left staring at the closed door.
But as Tristram rode over Folly Bridge, where the river ran yellow in the sunset, he knew that his course lay plain before him.
Half way up the long hill he checked his horse, and from sheer habit turned in the saddle. There stood the towers, orderly and lovely, in the faint mist of the autumn day's ending. He almost fancied that he could hear the bells of Magdalen. Many and many a time, riding into Oxford on summer afternoons, on winter mornings, had he pretended to himself that he was seeing the city for the first time, that its streets were strange to him, its pinnacles a new delight. Now, without any effort of the imagination, it seemed to him both that everything he had ever loved lay below him, cruel and valedictory, never to greet him again, and that it was a place in essence still unentered, an alien city. So, by the mind's alchemy, were the town he had loved and the woman he had lost made one, for a second, in his spirit.
But his course was plain. He rode on up the hill.
CHAPTER XII
(1)
Tristram's plain course was to lead him, and he knew it, into the waste places of the spirit. In such a desert he wrestled, two days later, with a radiant Horatia, himself miserably conscious both of the interpretation that the world would put upon his action, and of the futility of his effort, and stabbed to the heart by her transfigured personality, to him the surest evidence of what had happened.
Yet she was the same Horatia, as kind, as generous as ever. She listened very patiently to his exposition of the difficulties attendant on a marriage with a man of a different race, of a different creed; she seemed even to do homage to the motive which had prompted him to speech. A lesser woman, so much in love as she, would, he thought, have sent him about his business.