Now he had reached the old yew in the shadow of which they stood, as if he had attained his destination he stood still.
Montague felt a sharp shiver run through his companion’s arm, and he gripped it more closely, with a steady, warning pressure. The Bishop was not looking in their direction. There was yet a chance that he might pass on and leave them unobserved. The situation was ridiculous. They had no reason for concealing themselves. But the instinct, old as mankind, that prompts the two whom Fate has thrown together to avoid the intrusion of a third, the unacknowledged dread of being caught in an equivocal position, the half-formed wish to protect that gleaming, iridescent wonder that is called Romance from the sacrilegious touch of the outside world, all of these impulses had conspired to bring about this absurd concealment which the man found both gratifying and exasperating. To be discovered now would be humiliating, but if the critical moment passed and they were left in peace he recognized that another powerful link would be added to the chain that some caprice had induced him to forge.
As for the woman, he had no clue to her thoughts. He only knew that with her whole soul she hoped to escape undetected.
The Bishop had turned towards the edge of the lake, and was standing there in sombre reflection.
“What on earth is he thinking about?” questioned Montague with himself. “He can’t know we are here! He wouldn’t play such a cad’s game as that.”
Nevertheless his heart misgave him. He had no faith in the Bishop’s sense of fair play. In his own weird fashion he believed him to be even more unscrupulous than he was himself. That any beauty of scene held him in that trance-like stillness he did not believe. He was merely thinking out some fell design for the glory of the fetish he worshipped.
Montague began to grow impatient. Were they to be kept there in suspense all night while he worked out his fantastic problems? He began to consider the possibility of making a move unheard and unseen while the Bishop remained wrapt in meditation. He had passed so close to them without seeing them that it seemed more than possible that an escape could be accomplished without any very serious risk.
He pressed his companion’s arm and was aware of her eyes strangely luminous in the shadow turned towards him in enquiry. By some trick of the moonlight, the pale features took on a sudden unexpected beauty. He saw her in that moment not as the woman she was, faded and weary with the long harassment of overwork and anxiety, but as the woman she might have been, vivid, enchanting, young. . . . The illusion was so arresting that he forgot his purpose and stood, gazing upon her, bound by a spell that he had not known for years.
There came a sound through the magic stillness—the soft chiming of the quarter from the Cathedral tower. The Bishop stirred as if a hand had been laid upon him, stirred and turned.
His face was in the full moonlight, and it was the face of a denunciatory prophet. He spoke in hollow tones that reached them like a voice of doom.