The actors departed; the oil lamps were extinguished, and the vicar and his sister returned home. She said little by the way, and her severe silence made him rather nervous.
"Well," he broke out at length, "jolly good, I think, for a first attempt—eh, Alice?"
"I'm glad you were satisfied, dear. Everything depends upon us—that seems quite clear, at any rate. They'll all get terribly self-conscious and silly, I'm afraid, long before the time comes. However, we must hope for the best. But I shouldn't be in a hurry to ask anybody who really matters."
CHAPTER XII
In a triangle the wild land of the Rut sloped down from Hawk House to the valley beneath, and its solitary time of splendour belonged to Spring, when the great furzes were blooming and the white thorns filled the valley with light. Hither came Mark to keep tryst with Cora beside the stream. He walked not loverly but languid, for his mind was in trouble, and his gait reflected it.
To water's brink he came, sat on a familiar stump above Torry Brook, and watched sunshine play over the ripples and a dance of flies upon the sunshine.
Looked at in a mass, the insects seemed no more than a glimmering, like a heat haze, over the water and against the background of the woods; but noted closer the plan and pattern of these myriads showed method: the little storm of flies gyrated in a circle, and while the whole cluster swept this way and that with the proper motion of the mass, yet each individual, like planets round the sun, revolved about a definite but shifting centre. The insects whirled round and round, rose and sank again, each atom describing repeated circles; and though the united motion of this company suspended here in air appeared inconceivably rapid and dazzling, yet the progress of each single gnat was not fast.
Mark observed this little galaxy of glittering lives, and, knowing some natural history, he considered intelligently the thing he saw. For a moment it distracted him. A warm noon had wakened innumerable brief existences that a cold night would still again. All this immense energy must soon cease and the ephemeral atoms perish at the chill touch of evening; but to Nature it mattered neither more nor less if a dance of nebulæ or a dance of gnats should make an end that night. Countless successions of both were a part of her work. From awful marriages of ancient suns new suns would certainly be born; and out of this midge dance here above the water, potential dances for another day were ensured, before the little system sank to rest, the aureole of living light became extinguished.
He turned from the whirl and wail of the gnats to his own thoughts, and found them also revolving restlessly. But their sun and centre was Cora. He had asked her to meet him here, in a favourite and secret place, that he might speak harsh things to her. There was no love-making toward just now. She had angered him once and again. He considered his grievances, strove to palliate them, and see all with due allowance; but his habit of mind, if vague, was not unjust. He loved her passionately, but that she should put deliberate indignities upon him argued a faulty reciprocity of love. Time had revealed that Cora did not care for Mark as well as he cared for her; and that would not have mattered—he held it reasonable. But he desired a larger measure of affection and respect than he had received. Then to his quick senses even the existing affection diminished, and respect appeared to die.