Margery brought in a letter at this moment as the postman had just penetrated to Bear Down—a feat he rarely accomplished much before midday. Doctor Clack wondered in secret whether her old lover had also communicated with Honor, but seeing that his own missive was charged with a general message of goodwill to all at Endicott's, he suspected the letter came from elsewhere.
Soon he was gone; then, without comment, Mark's niece read aloud a brief note from Myles Stapledon. It did no more than set forth his determination to return in a fortnight's time. Reason for the step was not given, as the writer disdained any excuse. His words were bald. "I will arrive on such a date, if convenient," he concluded; and Mark Endicott, reading ahead and reading backwards also, was saddened, even amazed, as one standing before the sudden discovery of an unsuspected weakness or obvious flaw in a work he had rejoiced to believe near perfection.
The stages by which Myles had arrived at the determination now astonishing Mark Endicott had extended over three months, and the curtain rose upon his battle exactly a week after he left the farm, for at that date he learned how the engagement between Honor and Christopher was definitely at an end, and how the latter would be on the sea before his words were read. The announcement came from Yeoland himself, and was written in London on the eve of his departure. Then began the fight that ended with a determination to return, and caused such genuine disappointment in Mr. Endicott. Mark, however, forgot the force of the passion his niece had awakened in this man; and certain it is that neither he nor any other could have guessed at the storm which swept Stapledon's soul when he learned how Honor had regained her freedom. Soaked as he was in love, to remain away from Endicott's with this knowledge for three months had proved no mean task to Myles. The battle fought and won with his passion while it had no right to exist proved but a prelude to encounters far more tremendous upon Christopher Yeoland's departure.
There grew within him a web of sophistry spun through sleepless nights. This at first, with the oncoming of morning, he swept away; but, spider-like, and with a spider's patience, the love in him renewed each mesh, and asked his conscience a question that his conscience seemed powerless to answer. He fought, yet knew not the name of the foe. To-day he marvelled at his own hesitation, and asked himself what still held him back; to-morrow a shadow of Yeoland shamed his troubled longings, and the word of Mark Endicott, "between you is a great gulf fixed," reverberated drearily upon his thoughts. Then the cloud castles fell to earth, and the sanguine glow upon their pinnacles vanished away. Yet against that saying of the blind man's every pulse in his body often throbbed furiously. He knew better, and Honor knew better also. It was not for nothing that they had walked over the Moor together; not for nothing they had stood silently, each by the other's side, on moonlight nights.
Out of darkness Christopher Yeoland sometimes took shape, but only as an abstraction that grew more misty with passage of days. He had gone for all time; and Honor was left alone. Myles burnt to know something of her mind; how much or how little she had forgotten; how much or how little she wondered at his attitude; in what she blamed him; whether such blame grew daily greater or was already fading away—perhaps along with his own image—in her recollection.
The great apparition of Duty rose. In the recent past he had made others supremely unhappy and tormented himself. That was over; and now—the slave of duty from his youth up—he stood in doubt. For the first time the man discerned no clear sign-post pointing to his road. Wherein lay duty now? He wearied his brain with dialectics. Sometimes duty looked a question of pure love; sometimes it hardened into a problem of pure logic. He would have risked all that he had for one glimpse of Honor's attitude towards the position; and finally he decided that his duty lay in ascertaining that attitude. This much might very easily be done without a word upon the vital theme. He told himself that a few hours under the same roof with her—the sound of her voice, the light in her eyes—would tell him all he needed to know. He dinned this assurance upon his own mind; but his heart remained dead, even before such a determination, and the cloud by no means lifted itself from off him. He presented the somewhat uncommon spectacle of a man trying to deceive himself and failing. His natural instincts of justice and probity thrust Christopher Yeoland again and again into his thoughts. He began three letters to the traveller on three separate occasions, but these efforts ended in fire, and the letter that was written and posted went to Bear Down.
Through turmoil, tribulation, and deepening of frontal furrows he reached this step, and the deed done, his night thickened around him instead of lifting as he had hoped and trusted. Perhaps the blackest hour of all was that wherein he rode through familiar hamlets under the Moor upon his way to Honor. Then came the real sting of the certainty that he had lapsed from his own lofty rule; and love itself forsook him for a space beneath Cosdon's huge shadow at sunset time. He hastened, even galloped forward to the sight of the woman; he told himself that in her presence alone would be found balm to soothe this hurt; and the very feebleness of the thought fretted him the more.
So he came back, and Chance, building as her custom is on foundations of the trivial, wrought from his return the subsequent fabric of all his days. For out of the deliberate action, whether begun in laughter or prayer, whether prompted by desire or inspired by high ambition, springs issue, and no deed yet was ever barren of consequence, hidden or revealed. Never, since conscious intelligence awakened here, has that invention of the dunces justified itself—never once has any god from any chariot of fire descended to cut one sole knot in a tangle of earthly affairs. The seeds of human actions are sown to certain fruition but uncertain crop, and Fate and Chance, juggling with their growth, afford images of the highest tragedy this world has wept at; conjure from the irony of natural operations all that pertains to sweet and bitter laughter; embrace and environ the whole apparition of humanity's progress through time. Life's pictures, indeed, depend upon play of ridiculous and tragic chance for their rainbow light, for their huge spaces of formless and unfathomable shadow, for their ironic architecture, their statuary of mingled mice and mountains—flung together, fantastic and awful. In Titan visions these things are seen by lightning or by glow-worm glimmer; or sunned by laughter; or rained upon with tears; or taking such substance and colour as wings above the reach of either.
Thus, his deed done, through chaos of painful thoughts, came Myles Stapledon; and then, standing amid the naked beds of Bear Down garden, he found Honor Endicott's little hand in his at last. Whereupon he whispered to his soul that he had acted wisely, and was now about to pass from storm into a haven of great peace.
CHAPTER XIII.