“No, I am not the least tired of it,” he said, “and that is partly the reason why I am going. It is always a pity to stop till one is tired of a thing. You see, necessarily I am not so much at home here as you are, and that I should be tired of it some time goes without saying. But I have another reason for going, which perhaps you will know about soon.”
“You said that last night,” said Markham.
“Only once? I wonder I haven’t said it oftener.”
He paused a moment, and mentally threw a rope across the ravine, and saw it fail to reach the other side, and dangle helplessly in the air.
“Well, good-bye, old boy; I must be off if I am to catch my train,” he said. “I’m going straight home. Messages of all sorts, I suppose? I read Aristophanes most mornings with your father. I am very stupid, but he is very kind.”
It was nearly dark when he got home, but the evening was still and warm, and after tea he took a short stroll up to the top of the hill in front of the house, and watched the crimson-splashed west paling to saffron before the approach of night. In front lay a gentle slope of thick-growing, tussocky grass, and beyond, a clump of silver-stemmed birch trees, standing slender and still luminous in the gathering dusk. Through the bushes the little noises of night crept stealthily about, and one by one the stars were lit in the velvet sky, and all things lay hushed under the benediction of night.
But in his mind, as the colours faded out of earth and air, a golden morrow dawned and brightened. He would see her to-morrow; he would come as a man to a woman; he would claim his right to know his fate, be it best or worst. He would not have hastened even if he could those few hours that lay between him and the next day. There had been something in their intercourse of late which made him know, or think he knew, that it would be well with him. The fine instinct of a lover, which formulates nothing, made him absolutely and entirely happy at the present moment. Unconsciously, he enjoyed the pleasures of the Higher Hedonist, who knows that the long-drawn pause before the full melody bursts out is of infinite moment. The anticipation of pain is nearly always keener, especially to imaginative and emotional people, than the pain itself, and the same thing is true, even in a higher degree, of joy. Not that Tom was conscious at the time that he was pro tempore a philosopher of the Higher Hedonist school. All he knew was that the thought of May flooded the half hour he sat alone and looked at the paling west, and made it a rosary of passionately happy moments.
Tom, who could never be in time for breakfast at an easy half-past nine at Cambridge, found no difficulty in getting to the vicarage at half-past eight. Breakfast passed as usual, Mr. Markham making vitriolic comments on the tactics of the Liberal party, and May and Tom trying to originate intelligent observations on politics, which they seldom or never succeeded in doing, and after breakfast Mr. Markham and Tom lit pipes and began on their Aristophanes.
The vicar observed that Tom was even less attentive than usual, and, with a certain amount of tact, remembered, at the end of half an hour, that he had some pressing work to do.
Tom shut up his book at once, and hoped he hadn’t already taken up too much of the vicar’s time. The vicar replied: “Not at all,” and nobody knew what to say next.