Now and again, carried away by the history of things remembered, she visualized scenes for him with the ardour of an artist and a lover of created things. He realized how powerful a hold the old life still had upon her. She understood it, too, for when at last she told of the great event in England which changed her life, and made her a deserter from Gipsy life; when she came to the giving of the pledge to a dying woman, and how she had kept that pledge, and how her father had kept it, sternly, faithfully, in spite of all it involved, she said to him:
“It may seem strange to you, living as I live now in one spot, with everything to make life easy, that I should long sometimes for that old life. I hate it in my heart of hearts, yet there’s something about it that belongs to me, that’s behind me, if that tells you anything. It’s as though there was some other self in me which reached far, far back into centuries, that wills me to do this and wills me to do that. It sounds mad to you of course, but there have been times when I have had a wild longing to go back to it all, to what some Gorgio writers call the pariah world—the Ishmaelites.”
More than once Ingolby’s heart throbbed heavily against his breast as he felt the passion of her nature, its extraordinary truthfulness, making it clear to him by indirect phrases that even Jethro Fawe, whom she despised, still had a hateful fascination for her. It was all at variance to her present self, but it summoned her through the long avenues of ancestry, predisposition; through the secret communion of those who, being dead, yet speak.
“It’s a great story told in a great way,” he said, when she had finished. “It’s the most honest thing I ever heard, but it’s not the most truthful thing I ever heard. I don’t think we can tell the exact truth about ourselves. We try to be honest; we are savagely in earnest about it, and so we exaggerate the bad things we do, and we often show distrust of the good things we do. That’s not a fair picture. I believe you’ve told me the truth as you see it and feel it, but I don’t think it’s the real truth. In my mind I sometimes see an oriel window in the college where I spent three years. I used to work and think for hours in that oriel window, and in the fights I’ve been having lately I’ve looked back and thought I wanted it again; wanted to be there in the peace of it all, with the books, and the lectures, and the drone of history, and the drudgery of examinations; but if I did go back to it, three days’d sicken me, and if you went back to the Gipsy life three days’d sicken you.”
“Yes, I know. Three hours would sicken me. But what might not happen in those three hours! Can’t you understand?”
Suddenly she got to her feet with a passionate exclamation, her clenched hands went to her temples in an agony of emotion. “Can’t you understand?” she repeated. “It’s the going back at all for three days, for three hours, for three minutes that counts. It might spoil everything; it might kill my life.”
His face flushed, crimsoned, then became pale; his hands ceased moving; the knitting lay still on his knee. “Maybe, but you aren’t going back for three minutes, any more than I’m going back to the oriel window for three seconds,” he said. “We dreamers have a lot of agony in thinking about the things we’re never going to do—just as much agony as in thinking about the things we’ve done. Every one of us dreamers ought to be insulated. We ought to wear emotional lightning-rods to carry off the brain-waves into the ground.
“I’ve never heard such a wonderful story,” he added, after an instant, with an intense longing to hold out his arms to her, and a still more intense will to do no such wrong. A blind man had no right or title to be a slave-owner, for that was what marriage to him would be. A wife would be a victim. He saw himself, felt himself being gradually devitalized, with only the placid brain left, considering only the problem of hourly comfort, and trying to neutralize the penalties of blindness. She must not be sacrificed to that, for apart from all else she had greatness of a kind in her. He knew far better than he had said of the storm of emotion in her, and he knew that she had not exaggerated the temptation which sang in her ears. Jethro Fawe—the thought of the man revolted him; and yet there was something about the fellow, a temperamental power, the glamour and garishness of Nature’s gifts, prostituted though they were, finding expression in a striking personality, in a body of athletic grace—a man-beauty.
“Have you seen Jethro Fawe lately?” he asked. “Not since”—she was going to say not since the morning her father had passed the sentence of the patrin upon him; but she paused in time. “Not since everything happened to you,” she added presently.
“He knows the game is up,” Ingolby remarked with forced cheerfulness. “He won’t be asking for any more.”