Her tone was embarrassed. They parted almost coldly.
Lydia walked quickly home, down a sloping lane from which the ravines of Blencathra, edge behind edge, chasm beyond chasm, were to be seen against the sunset, and all the intermediate landscape—wood, and stubble, and ferny slope—steeped in stormy majesties of light. But for once the quick artist sense was shut against Nature's spectacles. She walked in a blind anguish of self-knowledge and self-scorn. She who had plumed herself on the poised mind, the mastered senses!
She moaned to herself.
"Why didn't he tell me—warn me! To sell himself to that man—to act for him—defend him—apologize for him—and for those awful, awful things! An agent must."
And she thought of some indignant talk of Undershaw, which she had heard that morning.
Her moral self was full of repulsion; her heart was torn. Friend? She owned her weakness, and despised it. Turning aside, she leant a while against a gate, hiding her face from the glory of the evening. Week by week—she knew it now!—through that frank interchange of mind with mind, of heart with heart, represented by that earlier correspondence, still more perhaps through the checks and disappointments of its later phases, Claude Faversham had made his way into the citadel.
The puny defences she had built about the freedom of her maiden life and will lay in ruins. Her theories were scattered like the autumn leaves that were scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore accusingness; the very contradictions of the man's personality, now delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the passion she must needs divine—of these various impressions, small and great, she was the struggling captive. Serenity, peace were gone.
Meanwhile, as Faversham rode toward the Tower, absorbed at one moment in a misery of longing, and the next in a heat of self-defence, perhaps the strongest feeling that finally emerged was one of dismay that her abrupt leave-taking had prevented him from telling her of that other matter of which Tatham's visit had informed him. She must hear of it immediately, and from those who would judge and perhaps denounce him.
Nevertheless, as he dismounted at the Tower, neither the burden of Mainstairs, nor the fear of Lydia's disapproval, nor the agitation of the news from Duddon, had moved him one jot from his purpose. A man surely is a coward and a weakling, he thought, who cannot grasp the "skirts of happy chance," while they are there for the grasping; cannot take what the gods offer, while they offer it, lest they withdraw it forever.
Yet, suppose, that by his own act, he raised a moral barrier between himself and Lydia Penfold which such a personality would never permit itself to pass?