She shook herself free and flitted like a shadow into the night. The word “Perhaps” floated back to him through the dark.
He stood for some time looking at the twinkling light of the farm; soon a large steady one emerged from it, moving forward slowly, and he guessed that Isoline’s lantern-bearer was piloting her home. The light wound along, leaving a shine behind it, against which he could see the dark outline of some moving thing, turned, wavered at the place where he knew there was a gate, and finally disappeared. He climbed to the high ground and set his face in the direction of the Pedlar’s Stone. Though pitch dark, it was still early, which made him anxious to get back to the shelter of its ill-omened presence, for his feeling of security had been shaken.
In spite of this he went along with the tread of a man who is light of heart, his head full of the fascinating personality whose existence had been unknown to him a few hours before, but whose appearing had let loose a whole flock of new possibilities. He thought of her voice, of her little slender feet, of the brilliant face that had dawned upon him through the dusk with the turning back of her veil, of her pretty gesture of terror as she saw him draw out his knife; he went over in his mind each word she had said to him since the instant he had sprung up from the rock and found her standing behind him. Even her very name was a revelation of delicacy and ornament; Isoline—Isoline—Isoline—he said it over to himself again and again; it was to the Janes and Annes of his experience as a hothouse flower is to cottage herbs, a nightingale’s song to the homely chatter of starlings, a floating breath from the refinements which exist apart from the rough utilities of the world. He sighed impatiently as another face thrust itself between him and his new ideal. To think that he had ever supposed himself dominated by it! Mary’s eyes had once illumined him, Mary’s personality held his senses and feelings, but he laughed at himself for his blindness in having picked up a wayside pebble and imagined it a jewel.
Rhys had a certain amount of imagination, and femininity in one shape or another had been a necessity to him all his life; part of the repulsion he had often felt for his mother was due to the systematic way in which she had divested herself of every shred of feminine attraction in domestic life. This had not come to her as the result of Puritanic sympathies. Before religion had taken hold upon her the romance of all womanhood, of love, of marriage, of motherhood, had been an offence. She approved of people who led happy married lives, but it was an approval of the conventionality of the relationship; that the husband should remain the lover, the wife the mistress, was an idea to be dismissed with scorn. Marriage was a duty, and woman’s personal attraction a quality to be reduced to the level of handsome domestic furniture, a credit to the home which contained it. That a married man and woman of more than a year’s standing should be in love with each other was more than an absurdity, it was almost an indecency. Since he had been able to think at all, Rhys had dimly felt this, for it is a frame of mind of whose existence in a woman no masculine human being is ever quite unconscious. When he had grown old enough to understand it, it had given him a violent push in the opposite direction, and set his adolescent brain in a flame.
It was so dark when he reached the Pedlar’s Stone that he had to grope about among the bushes to find it, and he traced his way from it with difficulty to the rock on which he and Isoline had sat. He would come there the next evening and the evening after—every day until the early rising moon should make it impossible. He began to reckon up the calendar on his fingers, trying to make out how many light nights there would be in the following month; February had begun, and the days were lengthening slowly, but by the middle of March there would be no more chances of meeting. Though she had only said “Perhaps,” his hopes were rampant, for he had not been accustomed to neglect where women were concerned. He did not undervalue the risk he was running by putting himself in the power of a girl’s idle tongue, yet he never hesitated; he was like the miner who will not be deterred from lighting his pipe in the danger-laden atmosphere of the mine. He was a cautious man in ordinary things; it had taken him some time to make up his mind to join Rebecca, and, when he had done so, he had arranged an elaborate scheme for his own security instead of trusting to luck with his companions. But the life of successful hiding which he now lived was making him reckless, and where a woman was in the question he had always been ready to throw common-sense to the winds. He did not trouble himself to think what the end of this unexpected interest might be; in any case it would put a zest into the constrained life he led just as sheep-stealing had done. Would she forget him or refuse to return to the Pedlar’s Stone? That was the only anxiety he had, but it was a very half-hearted one, for he felt sure she would not. A future of pleasant dallying lay indefinitely before him, he hoped, with the prospect of a voyage, when the Pig-driver should assure him that all was quiet, and a new life begun in a new country.
His regret for Mary had vanished utterly. As he had been to Crishowell church once or twice, he knew Mr. Lewis perfectly by sight, and the irony of things made him smile as he realized that, in his own former respectable personality of Mr. Walters of Great Masterhouse, he could never have hoped to speak to the Vicar’s lovely niece. He was a farmer, he reflected, she a lady, not knowing that no circumstances in this world could have made Isoline Ridgeway a gentlewoman. It pleased him to find that, as he had slipped from his original and obvious surroundings, she had evidently taken him for a man of her own class. His feeling of exhilaration made him wish for some one to whom he might pour out the praises of Isoline; in presence of a companion the thought of her would have loosened his tongue like wine mounting to his brain. He longed to shout, to cry her beauty aloud, to flaunt it and her condescension to him in the faces of other men, but there was no one he could speak to except a dull yokel, to whom the very name of love would convey nothing but the most ordinary instincts. It was hard; but he felt that, in spite of all his misfortunes, he was in the better case of the two. He could at least appreciate the high pleasures open to humanity, for his soul was not bounded by the petty fence of commonplace which enclosed George and shut out his view of life’s loftier things.
He comforted himself with that; yet, as he sat on the rock, his mind filled with the radiance left by Isoline, the picture of the sheep-stealer’s unemotional face, set in the ugly framing of the cottage walls, seemed to him like the shadow of some sordid implement of labour against a moonlit landscape.
One must pay for everything in this world; even high-mindedness costs its owner something.