‘Oh, but it’s must,’ he said; ‘I must go on. You see—why, everything depends on struggling through: the future! But if you only knew—There!’ Again his arm swept out, and the lean terrified face turned shuddering from the dark.
‘I do know; believe me, believe me! I can guess. See, I am coming with you; we will go together. As if, as if I did not know what it is to be afraid. Oh, believe me; no one is near; we go on; and see! it gradually, gradually lightens. How thankful I am I came.’
She had turned and they were steadily ascending as if pushing their way, battling on through some obstacle of the mind rather than of the senses beneath the star-powdered callous vault of night. And it seemed to Lawford as if, as they pressed on together, some obscure detestable presence as slowly, as doggedly had drawn worsted aside. He could see again the peaceful outspread branches of the trees, the lych-gate standing in clear-cut silhouette against the liquid dusk of the sky. A strange calm stole over his mind. The very meaning and memory of his fear faded out and vanished, as the passed-away clouds of a storm that leave a purer, serener sky.
They stopped and stood together on the brow of the little hill, and Lawford, still trembling from head to foot, looked back across the hushed and lightless countryside. ‘It’s all gone now,’ he said wearily, ‘and now there’s nothing left. You see, I cannot even ask your forgiveness—and a stranger!’
‘Please don’t say that—unless—unless—a “pilgrim” too. I think, surely, you must own we did have the best of it that time. Yes—and I don’t care who may be listening—but we did win through.’
‘What can I say? How shall I explain? How shall I make you understand?’
The clear grey eyes showed not the faintest perturbation. ‘But I do; I do indeed, in part; I do understand, ever so faintly.’
‘And now I will come back with you.’
They paused in the darkness face to face, the silence of the sky, arched in its vastness above the little hill, the only witness of their triumph.
She turned unquestioningly. And laughing softly almost as children do, the stalking shadows of a twilight wood behind them—they trod in silence back to the house. They said good-bye at the gate, and Lawford started once more for home. He walked slowly, conscious of an almost intolerable weariness, as if his strength had suddenly been wrested away from him. And at some distance beyond the top of the hill he sat down on the bank beside a nettled ditch, and with his book pressed down upon the wayside grass struck a match, and holding it low in the scented, windless air turned slowly the cockled leaf.