“Ah! yes, I see. Do you think that the railway spoils the landscape, Miss Methvyn?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it,” she said. “It has always been there. Charlie used to be so fond of watching for the white feathers of steam coming into sight and disappearing again. He liked the railway, because he had a notion that any day, if he ran to Haverstock, he could get to his mother at once. The fancy cheered him when he first came to live here, and she went away. I have never cared to see the trains go by lately.”
As she spoke a shrill whistle sounded in the distance. Cicely turned and began to retrace her steps.
“Associations must sometimes be terrible things,” said Mr. Guildford gently.
Something in his voice encouraged Cicely to say more. “There is a still more painful feeling that I have never heard described,” she said. “I have often wondered if other people have felt it. The sound of that railway whistle put it into my mind, and the speaking of Charlie’s fancy about it. What I mean is a sort of hatred of everything tangible—material rather. It came over me dreadfully after he died. It seemed to me that even the material things he had loved now separated me from him. Just as he, in his innocence, loved the railway, because he thought it would take him to his mother, so I could not endure to see it, because I felt that it—that nothing material could take me to him or bring him back to me. Everything, except memory, seemed to separate me further from him. I have had this feeling twice; yes, I think, twice in my life,” she repeated. “Did you ever feel it, or is it only a womanish feeling?”
Mr. Guildford had listened to her with some surprise, but still with attention and a wish to follow her meaning.
“I think I understand you,” he said thoughtfully. “It seems to me your feeling must somewhere have affinity with what I—like every student of practical science—realise incessantly; the utter insurmountability of the barrier between matter and spirit. It sounds very commonplace, but it is the puzzle. We are so hedged in, in every direction the old hitting one’s head against the wall. And the only thing to be done is to turn round and work one’s hardest inside the limits.”
“Yes,” said Cicely. “Yes. I understand.” Then she was silent for a minute or two. “I suppose,” she said at last, “I suppose if we could put our feelings into words, we should always find some one who shared them.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “Not that I have ever felt your special kind of revolt against our prison bars, Miss Methvyn. I have never been separated by death from any one that I cared very much about.”
“You have been very happy then,” she said.