Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change and development in her. It was as though her mother and her mother’s soul showed through the girl’s slighter temperament. The old satiric aloofness in Connie’s brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not her mother’s, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. Ella Risborough’s sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions of hidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough’s bright sweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since her arrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gone through it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? What can a man friend do for a young girl in these fermenting years of her youth? And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an iron force upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felt himself powerless—in all the greater matters—and was inclined to think that he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own youth. They had been reading Homer together—parts both of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’; and through ‘that ageless mouth of all the world,’ what splendid things had spoken to her!—Hector’s courage, and Andromache’s tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the bitter pity of Achilles, mother-love and wife-love, death and the scorn of death. He had felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; for himself he had found her, especially of late, the dearest and most responsive of pupils.
But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was in love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the men of Sorell’s type—disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden’s type—strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined—is perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for women of the other.
Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always that Connie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she had somehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation—if it was a reconciliation. She wanted, no doubt, to heal Falloden’s conscience, and so to comfort her own. And she would sacrifice Otto, if need be, in the process! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.
Connie eyed him wistfully. Confidences seemed to be on her very lips, and then stopped there. In the end she neither explained nor confessed. But when he was gone she walked up and down the lawn under the evening sky, her hands behind her—passionately dreaming.
She had never thought of any such plan as had actually sprung to light. And she understood Sorell’s opposition.
All the same, her heart sang over it. When she had asked Radowitz and Douglas to meet, each unbeknown to the other, when she had sent away the kind old aunts and prepared it all, she had reckoned on powers of feeling in Falloden, in which apparently only she and Aunt Marcia believed; and she had counted on the mystical and religious fervour she had long since discovered in Radowitz. That night—after Sir Arthur’s death—she had looked trembling into the boy’s very soul, had perceived his wondering sense of a special message to him, through what had happened, from a God who suffered and forgives.
Yes, she had tried—to make peace.
And she guessed—the tears blinding her as she walked—at the true meaning of Falloden’s sudden impulse, and Otto’s consent. Falloden’s was an impulse of repentance; and Otto’s had been an impulse of pardon, in the Christian sense. ‘If I am to die, I will die at peace with him.’ Was that the thought—the tragic and touching thought, in the boy’s mind?
As to Falloden, could he do it?—could he rise to the height of what was offered him? She prayed he might; she believed he could.
Her whole being was aflame. Douglas was no longer in love with her; that was clear. What matter, if he made peace with his own soul? As for her, she loved him with her whole heart, and meant to go on loving him, whatever anyone might say. And that being so, she would of course never marry.