He looked up at a pounding of hoofs outside and a howl from the chained wolf. The sounds merged into a hilarious hubbub from the dining-room, betokening some neighborhood arrival.
His eyes, still gazing through the parted curtains, could discern dimly on the terrace a white image standing out in relief from the swathing darkness. It was a statue of Vesta, goddess of the domestic fireside. It seemed to gaze in at him with a peculiar quiet significance. To the Romans that image had stood for the hearthstone—for all the sweet, age-old conventionalities of life, such as enshrined his sister, in her placid country home, her children around her. He had a vision of a stately figure moving about the Abbey with a watching solicitude, and there flashed into his mind the beginning of one of his poems:
“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies—”
It sang itself over in his brain. The woman he would choose would be like that—cool, cloudless, beautiful as the night outside the open window. He knew such a woman, as flawless and as lovely—one, and one only. His thought, unweighted by purpose, had followed her since that July afternoon when she had handed him the golden guinea in exchange for his book. She was not in London now. At that moment she was in Mansfield, a sharp gallop across the Newstead moor. If he had ever had a dream of feminine perfectness, she was its embodiment. Would marriage with such a one fetter him? In the great clanging world that teased and worried him, would it not be a refuge?
A sudden recollection came to him, out of the dust of a past year—a recollection of a youth with bright eyes and tangled hair, in the Fleet Prison. There had been an hour, before success had bitten him, when he had promised himself that fame’s fox-fire should not lure him, that he would cherish his song and rid his soul of the petty things that dragged it down. How had that promise been fulfilled? With poor adventure, and empty intrigue and flickering rushlight amours to which that restless something in him had driven him on, an anchorless craft in the cross-tides of passion!
“Home!” he mused. “To pursue no will-o’-the-wisp of fancy! To shut out all vagrant winds and prolong that spark of celestial fire!”
He drew a quick sibilant breath, sat down, at the writing-table and wrote hastily but unerringly, a letter, clean-etched and unembellished, a simple statement and a question.
He signed it, laughing aloud as a sense of wild incongruity gushed over him. Through the heavy oaken doors he could hear mingled laughter and uproar. A stentorian bass was rumbling a drinking-song.
What a challenging antithesis! Lava and snow—erratic comet and chaste moon—jungle passions and the calm of a northern landscape! A proposal of marriage written at such a time and place, with a drinking-stave shouted in the next room! And what would be her answer?