“I am afraid I did not quite catch their significance,” he said, flushing. The confession was not so candid as it sounded, for he had been less intent on the quotation than on studying the sweetness of her face, and watching the emotional heaving of the jewelled butterfly on her beautiful bosom.
Olive Regan politely offered him the catalogue, and his flush grew deeper as he seemed to read his personal tragedy in the poet’s images. What ironical Providence had sent him the words just then?
“Oh! most dread desire of Love,
Life-thwarted.”
Perhaps it was that which made his life so unreal to him, which explained its hollowness. He had never loved.
In a strange flash of imaginative insight, it seemed to him that the room was full of lovers. Love was in the air; delicate rumors and whispers of divine delight, of holy pain, fluttered tremulously. On all sides couples moved, heart-bound, their beauty spiritualized, their very ugliness transfigured. Love redeemed the creation.
He remembered that in the days when he had trodden the lonely London pavements, hungry and heart-sick, jostled by hurrying crowds, he had yet seemed to himself the only solid figure amid a throng of shadows flitting to death and oblivion. In this tense instant he felt it was he that had always been the shadow; the one shadow amid a world of substantialities and solidities, a world that lived while he was recording the forms and colors of life.
And even if he should ever love—and the thought set his heart fluttering as he had imagined it could never flutter again—even if Love should ever make existence real for him, was he not predestined to a doom more terrible even than the apathy of loveless life?
“Linked in gyves I saw them stand,
Love shackled with Vain-Longing, hand to hand.”
Mrs. Wyndwood! She, too, was married. And in that thought he knew that Love had begun for him. The unrest into which the first vision of her had plunged him, and which time had stilled, had at last come to understand itself. He loved, and his love was vain. They had come to him, both at once—
“Love shackled with Vain-Longing, hand to hand.”