That at the moment when Luke, under the spell of the shadowy fragrance of the place, and the pliant submissiveness of the girl’s form, threw something of his old ardour into his kiss, her other, more desperate love should have dared such an approach, was a coincidence apparently of the very kind to appeal to the perverse taste of this planetary humour.
The actual result of such a strange consentaneousness of rival emotion was that the three human heads remained for a brief dramatic moment in close juxtaposition,—the two fair ones and the dark one so near one another, that it might have seemed almost inevitable that their thoughts should interact in that fatal proximity.
The pitiful pathos of the whole human comedy might well have been brought home to any curious observer able to pierce that twilight! Such an observer would have felt towards those three poor obsessed craniums the same sort of tenderness that they themselves would have been conscious of, had they suddenly come across a sleeping person or a dead body.
Strange, that the ultimate pity in these things,—in this blind antagonistic striving of human desires under such gracious flesh and blood—should only arouse these tolerant emotions when they are no longer of any avail! Had some impossible bolt from heaven stricken these three impassioned ones in their tragic approximation, how,—long afterwards,—the discoverer of the three skeletons would have moralized upon their fate! As it was, there was nothing but the irony of the gods to read what the irony of the gods was writing upon that moment’s drowning sands.
When Luke and Gladys left the barn, and hurriedly, under the rising moon, retook their way towards Nevilton, Clavering emerged from his concealment dazed and stupefied. He threw himself down in the darkness on the heap of oats and strove to give form and coherence to the wild flood of thoughts which swept through him.
So this was what he had come out to learn! This was the knowledge that his mad jealousy had driven him to snatch!
He thought of the exquisite sacredness—for him—of that morning’s ritual in the church, and of how easily he had persuaded himself to read into the girl’s preoccupied look something more than natural sadness over Andersen’s death. He had indeed,—only those short hours ago,—allowed himself the sweet illusion that this religious initiation really meant, for his pagan love, some kind of Vita Nuova.
The fates had rattled their dice, however, to a different tune. The unfortunate girl was indeed entering upon a Vita Nuova, but how hideously different a one from that which had been his hope!
On Wednesday came the confirmation service. How could he,—with any respect for his conscience as a guardian of these sacred rites,—permit Gladys to be confirmed now? Yet what ought he to do? Drops of cold sweat stood upon his forehead as he wondered whether it was incumbent upon him to take the first train the following morning for the bishop’s palace and to demand an interview.
No. Tomorrow the prelate would be starting on his episcopal tour. Clavering would have to pursue him from one remote country village to another, and what a pursuit that would be! He recoiled from the idea with sick aversion.