But now all the prestige of social success, everything that was represented by the fashion he had just left, was dwindling and fading; the effect of it falling away so that it seemed to him garish and unreal—as the lights and distractions of the town may seem to a man who sets his face eagerly towards the joy of his quiet home. The rest and immensity of nature was an enduring reality with which his love was in perfect accord. He and Phyllis had their place in it. If he could step down, now, to the sombre yews at the lake’s edge and take her in his arms, as he had done a month ago, his last doubts would vanish on the instant. They would be one with the greatness of earth, and able to look down with contempt from their perfect enthronement, at the frivolous and ephemeral superficiality of conventional life....
The sound of Greatorex’s voice seemed to take up the thread of his dreams.
“’Course, you’re a poet, Fell,” Greatorex said. “You feel an evening like this, I suppose? Means something quite tremendous to you?”
“You see,” Fell began, trembling on the verge of confession; “there is a reason why, more particularly, to-night....”
Greatorex turned round and looked at him. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “You’ll be sorry afterwards. Better not tell me. I know I look romantic, but I’m not. Harrison says I ought to have been a pirate. He’s wrong, I ought to have been a barrister. I’ll tell you, now, just what I’ve been thinking while I’ve been looking at all this view that makes you feel so sentimental. I’ve been thinking that I wouldn’t like to have a lake so near the house—unhealthy. And I don’t care for all those black yews, either. Melancholy, mournful, things.”
Fell shuddered. “They are mournful,” he agreed, “but they’re in keeping.”
“Too much,” Greatorex said. “I don’t know whether it’s your sentimental influence or not, Fell; but, damn it, this place makes me feel superstitious, to-night. It’s so infernally quiet and brooding, as if it were hatching some nasty mischief.”
“Or some wonderful miracle?” Fell suggested.
“We probably mean the same thing,” Greatorex said. “I’ve got a trick of using prose words to get attention. ‘Wonderful miracle,’ you know, would be either a cliché or bombast in a leader.”
Fell did not appear to hear this explanation. He was looking out over the swell of Orton Park that was separated from Harrison’s garden by the width of the lake. The afterglow was slowly dying and the greens of turf and wood were deepening and hardening into dark masses little softer than the funereal shadows of the clustered yews. The detail that had recently started into almost excessive prominence under the level light of the setting sun, was taking refuge in the temporary darkness before it emerged again altered in shape and colour to greet the mysteries of the moon. Only the lake still shone faintly, reflecting a last glimmer of brightness in the Northern sky. Near the island, a streamer of indigo ripples splayed out to mark the course of some belated water-bird, hurrying back to the cover of the reeds; and in the hush of the coming night Fell could almost believe that he heard the delicate clash and whisper of infinitely tiny waves breaking in hasty processional upon the sandy foreshore.