'But I am past thinking. Let us bury it all, and begin again. Words are nothing.'
Strange ending to a day of torture! As she towered above him in the dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of nature all dissolved, lost in this new heavenly weakness of love, he thought of the man who passed through the place of sin, and the place of expiation, and saw at last the rosy light creeping along the East, caught the white moving figures, and that sweet distant melody rising through the luminous air, which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of those 'shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and sun.' For eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future and distant. Dante knew it when he talked of 'quella que imparadisa la mia mente.' Paradise is here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands, whenever self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of personality are beaten down by the inrush of the Divine Spirit.
CHAPTER XLIV
The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose history we have followed for so long was over and done with. Henceforward to the end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as of old.
But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert than on Catherine. Afterwards she gradually came to feel, running all through his views of life, a note sterner, deeper, maturer than any present there before. The reasons for it were unknown to her, though sometimes her own tender, ignorant remorse supplied them. But they were hidden deep in Elsmere's memory.
A few days afterwards he was casually told that Madame de Netteville had left England for some time. As a matter of fact he never set eyes on her again. After a while the extravagance of his self-blame abated. He saw things as they were—without morbidness. But a certain boyish carelessness of mood he never afterwards quite recovered. Men and women of all classes, and not only among the poor, became more real and more tragic—moral truths more awful—to him. It was the penalty of a highly-strung nature set with exclusive intensity towards certain spiritual ends.
On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh Flaxman which had so deeply affected her, Catherine accompanied Elsmere to his Sunday lecture. He tried a little, tenderly, to dissuade her. But she went, shrinking and yet determined.
She had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon of his in Murewell Church, every detail of which by long brooding had been burnt into her mind. The bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook on the high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched quick-eyed artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved, implied in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the Passion; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was glad to be there.