Then she overcame her moment of regret. She had given him up to the burning sea, into whose spaces he sailed. He would come back to her inspired with the light and freedom of blue water. He would find her each day in the triumphing sun, in the gleam of breaking surf, in perfume carried from an Indian shore, in the shining of far mountains. He would fling out his love to catch at all the loveliness into which he was passing. The coloured earth should paint and refashion her; the sea should consecrate her; permanent hills, seen far off, should invest her in queenliness. Her hand should be upon him in the velvet wind. Her mystery should fall upon him out of the deep sky.
Could she regret days which were thus to glorify her? Filled with happiness, exultant and sure, she strained no longer after the lost ship. Peter had disappeared into a yellow mist that girdled all the visible sea. But already she saw him returning to claim in her all the beauty into which he sailed.
XLIV
Peter and Miranda were looking out over the selfsame burning water into which she had lately dismissed him. Six to seven months had passed, and on the morning of that day they had quietly been married in London. Now they stood high upon the cliffs overhanging a small western bay.
It was early September, and the night was warm. The water was lightly wrinkled. It shimmered from the extreme height at which they viewed it, like beaten metal. The light rapidly died down, and already the lit rooms of a house were brighter than the sky. The house was beneath them, alone upon the side of a steep hill, its windows wide to the sea.
Peter was alone with Miranda for the first time that day. Hardly a week ago he had been eagerly looking each morning towards England. From the time he had landed, and Miranda had seen in him a soul swept clean, a will straining towards her, he had lived in the clutch of preparation and routine. All was now ready, every unessential thing put away.
In long days upon the deck of his yacht Peter had come to distinguish between the physical unrest of his late years—vague and impersonal, afflicting him like hunger or the summer heat—and the perfect passion of his need for Miranda.
Gradually, too, in these long weeks upon the sea Peter began to see steadily things which hitherto had wavered. He had touched reality at last. He overleaped the categories in a burning sense that life was very vast and very near; that the virtue of men could not easily be measured and ranked; that the wonder of existence began when it ceased consciously to confront itself, to probe its deep heart, and absurdly to appoint itself a law. He went through his adventures of the last few years with a smile for his ready infatuation with small aspects of men and things. He had attempted to inspect the discipline of the world, calling mankind to attention as though it were a regiment. He had been a Socialist, and then very nearly a Tory. Now, between sky and water, he vainly tried to constrain things to a formula. He found that he no longer desired to do so. He began to understand his mother's deep, instinctive acceptance of time and fate. All now seemed unreal, except the quiet, happy, and assured act of life itself. Craning at the Southern stars, he no longer desired to measure or to track their passage. He felt them rather as kindred points of energy. The pedantry and pride of knowledge, the ambition to assess, the need to round off heaven, to group mankind in a definite posture and take for himself a firmly intelligible attitude in his own time and way—these things had suddenly left him. Life was now emotionally simple, and it therefore had ceased to be intellectually difficult. He had found humour and peace—an absolute content to receive the passing day. Life itself mattered so much to him—so brimmed him with the passion of being—that all he had thought or read was now rebuked as an insolent effort to contain the illimitable.