Chapter XVI: Part 16

She smiled at him. That favourite jest of his had been nearly true until now. Henceforth it could be true no more. It was not the picture of home and the thirsty, shorn grass lands spread around it that made her soul sink so low. Even Christopher henceforth was outside the last sanctuary of her heart, and must so remain. There had come a new sorrow of sorrows, to be hidden even from her second self--a grief not to be shared by him, a legacy of tears whose secret fountains he must never find.

She held his hand like a child, and something of her woe passed into him; then he knew that she was very sad, and suspected that her unhappiness had source in deeper things than the renewed spectacle of her home. He instantly fell into sympathy; but it was only a little deeper than that of an artist. What she felt now--walking where Myles Stapledon had so often walked--he could readily conceive; and it made him sad also, with a gentle, aesthetic melancholy that just fell short of pain. For him and for Honor he believed that a future of delicate happiness was spread. These clouds were natural, inevitable; but they scarcely obscured the blue. So he argued, ignorant of that anguish in the mind of his wife. For her the anticipated summer of peace appeared not possible. Now her future stretched before her--ghost-haunted in sober truth. Here was such a mournful twilight as broods over all personifications of highest grief; for her, as for those Titan figures--each an incarnate agony--who pace the aisles of olden drama, there could be no removal into the day-spring of hope, no departure into any night of indifference. Only an endless dusk of sorrow awaited her. Western light was upon her face; but not the glory of evening, nor yet the whole pageant of the sun's passing, could pierce the darkness of her heart.

They stood upon Scor Hill above the Moor; and Christopher spoke--

"This was his god--poor old Myles! This was a symbol to him of the Creator. A great, restful god, yet alive and alert. A changeless god--a god to pray to even--a listening god."

"He would have given all that he had to know a listening god," she said.

"And yet who is there but has sometimes seen his god, moving dimly, awfully, behind the veil? A flash--a divine gleam at higher moments. We fall on our knees, but the vision has gone. We yearn--we yearn to make our crying heard; but the clay comes between. That was his case. You and I have our Christ to cling to. He sweetens our cup of life--when we let Him. But Myles--he walked alone. That is among my saddest thoughts--among the very saddest thoughts that Nature and experience bring to me."

"The earth is very full of things that bring sad thoughts."

"Yes, and a man's heart still more full. There are plaintive sorrows I could tell you about--the sadness of hidden flowers, that no human eye ever looks upon--the sadness of great, lonely mists on lonely lands; the sadness of trees sleeping in moonlight; the sadness of a robbed bird; the eternal sadness and pathos of man's scant certainties and undying hopes. How wonderful he is! Nothing crushes him; nothing stills the little sanguine heart of him, throbbing on, beating on through all the bitter disillusions of this our life from generation to generation."

Far below them, in fulvous light of a wild sunset, the circle of Scor Hill appeared. Concerning the memories its granite girded, Christopher knew little; but, at sight of Watern's crest, now dark against the flaming sky, he remembered that there lay the scene of Stapledon's end, and regretted that he had come within sight of it that night. To him the distant mountain was a theatre of tragedy; to Honor, an altar of sacrifice.

Without words they waited and gazed upon the sky to witness after-glow succeed sunset. Over the Moor a vast and radiant mist burnt under the sun and faded to purple where it stretched beneath the shadows of the hills; and the earth, taking this great light to her bosom, veiled herself within it. All detail vanished, all fret of incident disappeared, while the inherent spirit of the place stood visible, where loneliness and vastness stretched to the sunset and heaved up their huge boundaries clad only in a mystery of ruddy haze. Particulars departed from the wilderness, save where, through alternate masses of gloom and transparent vapour, carrying their harmonies of orange and tawny light to culmination and crown of fire, there twinkled a burn--twinkled and tumbled and flashed, under mellow drapery of air and cloud, beneath flaming depths of the sunset, and through the heart of the earth-born mist, like a thread of golden beads. Here colour made a sudden music, sang, and then sank back into silence.

For heavy clouds already reared up out of the West to meet the sun; and amid far-flung banners and pennons and lances of glory he descended into darkness. Then the aspect of earth and heaven changed magically; day waned and grew dense, while a great gloom swept over the heath and rose to the zenith under a cowl of rain. Dim radii still turned upon the clouds where light fought through them; but their wan illumination was sucked away and they died before their shafts had roamed full course. The cry of the river rose and fell, the rain began to whisper, and all things merged with unaccustomed speed into formless chaos of twilight.

"No after-glow--then we must look within our own breasts for it--or, better still, each other's breasts," said the man.

But neither heart nor voice of the woman answered him.

THE END