“It is much worse to be lonely when you are young,� Lewis moralised. “But there is Miss Sylvia Shapleigh. I wonder if she will come up and talk to us?�
Sylvia did come up and speak to them. There was a new brilliancy in her smile, and a deep and eloquent flush upon her cheek. Bulstrode felt compelled to pay her one of his awkward compliments.
“My dear young lady,� he said, “to-night you look like one of those fair Greek girls of old, who lived but to smile and to dance and to love.�
Sylvia’s colour deepened; she stood quite still, gazing at Bulstrode as if he had uttered a prophecy; but then Lewis, suddenly seeing people going out of the bay windows on the lawn, cried out excitedly: “Now the finest part of the fireworks is going off! Come along!� And, seizing her hand, they went out on the smooth-shaven lawn as far as the river.
In spite of the coloured lights, it was dim, as there was no moon. The house, with its great wings, was so illuminated, that it looked enormously large. Afar off came the strains of music, while in the half darkness figures moved about like ghosts. Lewis and Sylvia, standing hand in hand, watched the great golden wheels that rose from a boat in the river magnificently lighting up the blue-black sky, and reflected in the blue-black water as they burst in a shower of sparkles. How good, in those days, were beautiful things to eyes unjaded, to minds prepared to marvel, to tastes so simple that almost anything could inspire wonder and delight!
Sylvia had no wrap around her shoulders, and after a while, as she and Lewis watched the fireworks, she felt a shawl gently placed about her. She realised, without turning her head, that the hand was Skelton’s. The rest of the time he stood with them. They were separated from the house by great clumps of crape myrtle, then in its first pink glory. Some invisible bond seemed to unite all three. Skelton felt with the keenest delight the delicious emotions of youth—he was too true a philosopher not to rejoice that he could still feel—and he had always feared and dreaded that chilling of his sensibilities which is the beginning of old age. How bewitching was Sylvia Shapleigh to him then, and if ever they should be married how kind she would be to Lewis! when suddenly came a piercing sense of chagrin and chafing rebellion. He was bound by a chain. All coercion was abnormally hateful to him; and, as Bulstrode had said, the wonder was that he had not gone mad in thinking over how he had been bound by the act of a dead woman.
Sylvia felt instinctively a change in him when he spoke. The fireworks were then over, and they went back to the house, where the dancers’ feet still beat monotonously and the music throbbed. They entered through the library windows, and Sylvia admired, as she always did, the noble and imposing array of books.
“Let them alone,� said Skelton, with his rare smile that always had something melancholy in it. “See what an old fossil it has made of me!�
Sylvia smiled at him archly, and said: “Yes, an old fossil, indeed! But then, when you have written your great book, you will be among the immortals. You will never grow old or die.�
The smile died away quickly from Skelton’s face. That book was another bond upon him—that unfulfilled promise to the world to produce something extraordinary. Nobody but Skelton knew the misery that unwritten book had cost him. It had shadowed his whole life.