She smiled and sighed, and he wrenched his mind to the consideration of the Buddhism of Browning. She followed him obediently, but the lines they wanted did not come easily; they were compelled to search and verify. Something lately seemed lost to them of that kind of glad activity; he was more aware of it than she, since he was less occupied in the aesthetic ecstasy of self-torture. In the old time before the sun rose they had been so conscious of realms of idea lying just beyond the achievement of thought, approachable, visible by phrases, brokenly, realms which they could see closer when they essayed together. He constantly struggled to reach those enchanted areas again, but they seemed to have gone down behind the horizon; and the only inspiration that carried them far drew its impetus from the poetry of their plight. They looked for verses to prove that Browning’s imagination carried him bravely through lives and lives to come, and found them to speculate whether in such chances they might hope to meet again.
And the talk came back to his difficulties with his Board of Management, and to her choice of a frame for the etching he had given her, by his friend the Glasgow impressionist, and to their opinion of a common acquaintance, and to Lorne and his prospects. He told her how little she resembled her brother, and where they diverged, and how; and she listened with submission and delight, enchanted to feel his hand upon her intimate nature. She lingered in the hall while he got into his overcoat, and saw that a glove was the worse for wear. “Would it be the heroic-in-little,” she begged, “to let me mend that?”
As he went out alone into the winter streets he too drew upon a pagan for his admonition. “‘What then art thou doing here, O imagination?’” he groaned in his private heart. “‘Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, for I want thee not. But thou art come again according to thy old fashion. I am not angry with thee, only go away!’”
CHAPTER XXV
Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire would be bad for her lover’s political prospects till she made him feel his honest passion almost a form of treachery to his party. She also hinted that, for the time being, it did not make particularly for her own comfort in the family circle, Mr Milburn having grown by this time quite bitter. She herself drew the excitement of intrigue from the situation, which she hid behind her pretty, pale, decorous features, and never betrayed by the least of her graceful gestures. She told herself that she had never been so right about anything as about that affair of the ring—imagine, for an instant, if she had been wearing it now! She would have banished Lorne altogether if she could. As he insisted on an occasional meeting, she clothed it in mystery, appointing it for an evening when her mother and aunt were out, and answering his ring at the door herself. To her family she remarked with detachment that you saw hardly anything of Lorne Murchison now, he was so taken up with his old election; and to Hesketh she confided her fear that politics did interfere with friendship, whatever he might say. He said a good deal, he cited lofty examples; but the only agreement he could get from her was the hope that the estrangement wouldn’t be permanent.
“But you are going to say something, Lorne,” she insisted, talking of the Jordanville meeting.
“Not much,” he told her. “It’s the safest district we’ve got, and they adore old Farquharson. He’ll do most of the talking—they wouldn’t thank me for taking up the time. Farquharson is going to tell them I’m a first-class man, and they couldn’t do better, and I’ve practically only to show my face and tell them I think so too.”
“But Mr Hesketh will speak?”
“Yes; we thought it would be a good chance of testing him. He may interest them, and he can’t do much harm, anyhow.”