That was her purpose, but, as she saw it, they were not to work together in the sense he meant. Her spirit was to go on with him, but she herself would stand aside, denying herself the right and the joy of sharing his work with him in physical partnership. She would have done her share at Marbeck: she was a sign-post whose direction he was to follow but which he left behind, not a guide to go with him on his way: and she thought she was content with that.
She renounced and she imagined that of the two of them it was she who was the realist and he who was romantic, he was romantic because he wanted her with him and she the realist because she remembered Ada. She was not jealous of Ada no’; if she could not bless Ada, neither did she damn her. Ada had never held him as Effie held him now. She thought it satisfied her to know that she held him, and to let the days slip past uncounted. Nothing is infinite except our human capacity for self-deception.
For the present, for the Marbeck heyday, it did satisfy her, and she went about the business of her tutelage with the unruffled serenity of fulfilled purpose, almost involuntarily now, thinking little, feeling everything in the passionate intensity of her sacramental love. It would end and she would suffer: meantime there were only so many days and it was no use impairing finite days with regrets that they were not infinite.
Thought was for before and afterwards, not for now when she crusaded for the soul of Sammy Branstone with the mystic rapture of a trance, joyful like the other sorts of true religion. She would wake up, but she would have taught Sam his lesson; she would have given him his gleam; and she was selfless after that....
Of course she may have deceived herself. There is spiritual love, but Effie was flesh and blood.
Sam, at any rate, was not etherealizing things. He did not appreciate the happiness of renouncing happiness. He wanted it to last, to go on with the gay days on the hills when she put health into his body and health into his mind, when it was all a high-spirited riot without an undertow. For hours on end, they lived their lives unclouded by a thought... rude, rough, exhilarating exercise on the glamorous fells like that illustrious day when they climbed the Pike and lost themselves in mist and found themselves again just where they wished to be, on the downward trail by Corner Tarn to Yorkdale: then on the steamer down the Lake, and the lonely moonlight walk across the Moor to Branley, where the trap from the Inn met them and took them, comfortably tired, to Marbeck and a giant’s feast. And there were other days, more leisured, on their Lake or in the woods when more seemed to happen in his soul and less in his body; and their day of Bathes, in five well separated tarns, with a makeweight bathe in the Marsland Beck for luck. He wanted it to last. He had intoxication of the hills, of her, of everything.
He had not seen, he would not and he could not, see the possibility of her leaving him. He did not know that leaving him was as fundamental a part of her plan as coming to him.
“We’ll go hack to Manchester,” she said, and it seemed to him that he was ordered hack to hell. “That’s where your business is,” she added, a little wickedly.
Business! Hadn’t she shown him the ugliness of his business, and the beauty of Marbeck? Why should they ever leave the hills? He had all the extremity of a convert.
Effie would say no more, and now, as the end of their time grew near, the magic seemed to him less magical, because he had to leave it, because she would not stay for ever in that lonely place, but wanted him to go where other men lived, in an ugly town, where he had a business she had taught him to despise, and responsibilities, and Ada.