“You know that Mr. Calladine has not got me, and never will have me, except in name,” said Clare.
“That’s true,” replied Lovel, not disputing her statement. “Let him live with you by his side, you listening, listening patiently, for as long as he chooses to discourse, and looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. I don’t say that I envy him. (“How you despise him!” she breathed.) And yet,” he said, “don’t I envy him a little? Can I help myself? He will see you every day, he will be able to call your name through the house at any moment and hear your answer. Don’t I envy him that? Wouldn’t I change places with him for that?—But he’ll tire of you, perhaps,” he added, dropping from his sudden anguish into the old whimsicality, “tire of you even though he has never got you. No, I don’t envy him. I’ll be less lonely,” he said with a fine insolence, “than he.”
“I must go, Lovel,” cried Clare.
He stepped back from her instantly.
“Go to Calladine,—in name. Go from me,—in name,” he said, out of his torn heart. “Only go,—go,—go!” he added, turning away from her and laying his arm across his eyes.
She left him then, feeling, although he had not once touched her, as though she had slipped all on fire from his clasp, so close had been their communion in spite of their immense separation. She did not know where he would go, or how long he would remain, gazing after her, standing on the height of the circle. For her own part she ran down amongst the trees, across the lawn, and entered the study by one of the French windows, to find her father absorbed in his work, not having noticed her absence, and blissfully unaware of any excitement or of his daughter having been in the slightest degree in danger. He said, “Bless me! bless me!” several times while she flung herself with exaggerated animation into a description of the fire, and pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead, and stared at her with an absent-minded interest as though she had just come straight out of the heart of the flames. “Dear, dear, and where’s Calladine?” he said at last. “There was something very curious I’ve come across and particularly wanted to show him. It quite corroborates my ideas. I made sure he’d bring you home.” “But you don’t understand, father: the circus-tent caught fire, and we got separated.” “Of course, to be sure,” said Mr. Warrener mildly. “Well, I daresay he’ll come over to-morrow, and I can show it him then. It’ll interest you too, Clare....”
Clare lay awake for a long time. The windows of her room were open, and outside the breeze sighed, a plaintive spirit trying to get into the house. The world outside was crying to her, endeavouring to reach her, sending its gentle messengers to plead with her. The heavy-foliaged trees rustled, as it seemed, with an unwonted nearness to her window, and the room was full of the insects of the night, which as soon as she had turned out her lamp woke into life and fluttered against her cheek and thudded softly against the ceiling like small downy ghosts. A moth imprisoned beneath her hand struggled for freedom; she shook it off with a gesture between tenderness and revulsion. Several times she lit a match, and the little creatures became still, flecking the bed with their long mottled bodies and closed wings, but no sooner had darkness fallen again than they returned in greater numbers to their soft wheeling and the bruising of their voiceless plea. She lay now shivering in spite of the summer warmth, awed to her very soul by the deepened significance of night. Darkness by shutting away the visible and reassuring world opened the field to all finer perceptions, to all the mysterious relationships, to the purified intuition of essential unity. That sense,—the sense of unity, the discarding of all irrelevancies,—was an unexpressed link between herself and Lovel; she was not sure, everything else being sifted down to its last bare expression, that it was not the link. Out in the night somewhere an owl hooted, and she heard the distant baying of a dog; the spacious presence of the Downs opened out before her widened senses, their loneliness, and the secret of their ancient tombs; their untilled defiance rolling eternally under the stars. Where was Lovel now? Was he still standing like a sentinel on the dyke, between the Downs and the sleeping village, with only the vault of the black sequined sky above his head? as she fancied him there he seemed to grow in stature until in his heroic proportions he became an embodiment of that open country which called to her, and his voice rose harmoniously in a long cry above the soughing of the breeze in the trees. Or had he plunged down from the circle after she had left him, to roam across the uplands, a wisdom in his feet, a swiftness that lifted him above fatigue? That he was out somewhere in the night she was sure; no house would confine him, not even a house whose walls were built of the sarsen stones. He was out somewhere, and every moth that bruised itself so plaintively and so impotently against her was his envoy; every sound that reached her, whether the whisper of the breeze or the churning of a night-jar, bore the burden of its message from him to her. If she called back to him “Lovel! Lovel!” surely in one form or another her voice would find him among the hills.