“These functions always addle my brain. I am beginning to recover.”
“For Heaven’s sake, hurry up, then.”
“My poor boy,” said Blanche, with a sly twinkle, “see what you have taken upon yourself. Awful responsibility being engaged. You must keep up appearances till you’re married, and then you can be as rude as you like. Only another month or so. Cheer up.”
Gabriel passed half an hour alone with Ophelia in the conservatory that evening. Her humor had changed, and the man’s brain was full of the fumes of her beauty ere she had ended. Gabriel’s window at Gabingly looked southward over the woods towards the sea. A full moon swam in a crystal sky that night, bathing the earth in mysterious splendor. A transcendent calm seemed to have compassed the sun-wearied trees. The world breathed anew under the benisons of the stars, and there was no sound to shake the silver web of sleep.
Gabriel crouched in the window-seat and stared out into the night. The glimmering spirelets of the forest thrust up multitudinous on the hill-side. The dark swell of the moors ran dim and distant beyond the far spirals of the Mallan. A great melancholy had fallen upon the man’s soul. His face shone white in the light of the moon. The cool breeze breathing from the sea seemed savored with a spiritual purity that wounded hope.
Restless visions glimmered in his brain. He saw himself and his own being circled in fire that fed upon his manhood. A girl’s face haunted him; her voice played through the moonlight. He beheld a figure radiant with a divine womanliness moving within the coil of sin and squalor, the sordid earthliness of an unlovely life. Forgotten chivalry had stirred his manhood like some ghostly trumpet-cry out of the past. He breathed out aspirations to the stars, dreams fair and impossibly pathetic. Joan Gildersedge! Joan Gildersedge! To dare, to suffer, to liberate, to love! Life born of sacrifice! Divine passion instinct with the inevitable yearnings of the soul!
The castle clock chimed midnight. In the echoing silence that ensued, sundry quick-snapping chords struck from a mandolin startled his abandonment. He stood up half wearily, passed a hand over his forehead, stared into space. Again the summons sounded from a neighboring casement. The man moved to and fro in the shadowy room like a soul that paces the darkened chamber of the flesh. Pierced by a sudden flashing pessimism, he moved to the door, opened it noiselessly, stepped out, turned and withdrew the key. Moonlight flooded from a large lancet window into the long gallery. And was this life! To sow unto corruption, to surrender the spirit to the dominion of the senses! Gabriel shuddered, but obeyed.
XI
FOR several days a morbid dejection had possessed the heavens, and clouds pressed gray and ponderous from over the sea. Rain had fallen perpetually, beating the beauty from the flowers, weighing down the foliage. A chill atmosphere had swept like the breath of an ice giant into the radiant loggias of summer. The wind never rested. It moaned and imprecated, pleaded and besought, broke forth into wild gusts of desperate blasphemy. The trees whispered together like shivering and misty ghosts before the gates of death. Their dim arms gesticulated in the rain. Their green bosoms stirred with a troubled breathing, impotent and piteous.
Atmospheric conditions exert an undue influence over minds that have wandered from the radiance of health into the twilight of morbidity. The stanch, big-chested toiler takes the storm into his bosom and laughs like a Norseman buffeting ice-brilliant seas. To those of feeble moral vitality the drearier passages of life are packed with intangible temptations and imagined possibilities for sin. The man whose heart is warm and clean cares nothing for rough weather. It is the bleached æsthetic who turns pessimist or sensualist to cheat his own shivering and hungry soul. Give the world a Tolstoï, rugged viking struggling giant-like towards the truth, rather than some De Musset or Baudelaire hugging an impotent sexuality in the lap of a prostituted art. The world needs prophets, not pessimists. Pessimism is the result of moral dyspepsia. It is a nobler thing to lift some simple lamp of truth to light the hearts of men than to build a brilliant philosophic system for the entangling of the intellect.