"Yes," Lady Adeline answered, "and I do so long for the mountains in weather like this."
"Oh, do you?" said Evadne. "Are you subject to the magnet of the mountains? I am not. I do not want to feel the nothingness of man; I like to believe in his greatness, in his infinite possibilities. I like to think of life as a level plain over which we can gallop to some goal—I don't know what, but something desirable; and the actual landscape pleases me best so. The great tumbled mountains make me melancholy, they are always foreboding something untoward, even at the best of times; but the open spaces, windswept and evident—I love them. I am at home on them. I can breathe there—I am free."
This was the natural woman at last, in her aspirations unconsciously showing herself superior to the artificial creature she was trying to be.
"I hate the melancholy mountains," the ever-ready Angelica burst forth. "I loathe the inconstant sea. The breezy plain for a gallop! It is there that one feels free!"
Colonel Colquhoun looked at Evadne meditatively, and slowly twisted each end of his heavy blond moustache. "I haven't seen you riding for some time now," he said, "and it's a pity, for you've a fine seat on a horse."
I was obliged to make up that night for the time lost in the afternoon, and the dawn had broken when at last I put my work away. I opened the study windows wider to salute it. A lark was singing somewhere out of sight—
Die Lerche, die im augen nicht,
Doch immer in den ohren ist—
and the ripples of undecipherable sound struck some equally inarticulate chord of sense, and fell full-fraught with association. The breeze, murmurous amongst the branches, set the leaves rustling like silk attire. Did I imagine it, or was there really a faint sweet perfume of yellow gorse in the air? A thrush on a bough below began to flute softly, trying its tones before it burst forth, giving full voice to its enthusiasm in one clear call, eloquent of life and love and longing, and all expressed in just three notes—crotchet, quaver, crotchet and rest—which shortly shaped themselves to a word in my heart, a word of just three syllables, the accent being on the penultimate—"E-vad-ne! E-vad-ne!"
Good Heavens!
I roused myself. Not a proper state of mind certainly for a man of my years and pursuits. Why, how old was I? Thirty-five—not so old in one way, yet ten years older at least than—stop—sickly sentimentality. "Life is real, life is earnest," and there must be no dreams of scented gorse, of posing in daffodil draperies, for me. Must take a holiday and rest—take my "agreeable ugliness" off (I was amused when the Heavenly Twins told me their mother talked of my "agreeable ugliness"; but, now, did I like it? No. I was cynical when I said it) take my "agreeable ugliness" off to the mountains—"Turn thine eyes unto the mountains"—the magnet of the mountains. Yes, I felt it. I delighted to do so. I was not morbid. To the mountains! to the cold which stays corruption, the snows which are pure, and the eternal silence! By ten o'clock that night I was well on my way.