Rest Harrow | Page 6

her,
he went a leisurely way through the press, and took a tram-car from the
corner of Vauxhall Bridge Road in the direction of Battersea.

II
Senhouse, after a night of solitary musing upon certain waste places
known best to outlanders, walked up Saint James's Street at six o'clock
in the morning, talking lightly and fiercely to himself. A long life of
loneliness had given him that habit incurably. Discovering the hour by
a clock in Piccadilly, he realised that it was too early to wait upon Mrs.
Germain in Albemarle Street, so continued his way up the empty hill,
entered the Park, and flung himself upon the turf under the elms. Other
guests were harboured by that hospitable sward, shambling, downcast
lice of the town. These, having shuffled thither, dropped, huddled and
slept. His way was not theirs: to him the open space was his domain.
He ranged the streets, one saw, as if they had been the South Downs,
with the long stride and sensitive tread of a man who reckons with
inequalities of footing. The country and the town were earth alike,
though now of springing grass and now again of flagstones.
His face, after a night of fierce self-searching, looked its age, that of a
man past forty; his aspect upon affairs was no more a detached
observer's; his eyes were hard, his smile was bleak. Sodden misery,
stupor, and despair lay all about him, and would have drawn his pitying
comments if it had not been so with him that all his concern must be for
himself.
"She wants me, and I must go to her," was the burden of his thought;
but, like a recurring line in a poem, it concluded very diverse matter.
"I played the traitor to her; I could not wait--and yet I must have known.
I said to myself, It is enough to have known and loved her; watch her
happy, and thank God. That should have been enough for any man who
had ever seen the blue beam of her eyes shed in kindliness upon him;
but I grew blind and could not see. I lost my lamp and went astray. I
ran about asking one after another to stop the bleeding of my wound.
God is good. After eight years, _she wants me, and I must go to her._

"I love her, as I have always loved; for she is always there, and I have
come back. She can never change, though her beauty grow graver, and
all knowledge of the vile usage of the world have passed before her
young eyes. Artemis no more, for she has stooped to the lot of women;
but still invincibly pure, incapable of sin, though she know it all. It can
never touch her; she goes her way. She wears a blue gown now, not a
white one. Demeter, the sad, bountiful Mother she will be--yet the same
woman, the sweet and grave, the inflexible, the eternal. And, standing
as she has always stood, _she wants me, and I must go to her._
"I remember the wonder, I remember the morning glory of her first
appearing. The spell of the woods was upon her. Bare-headed, gowned
in white, she girt up her vesture and dipped her white limbs in the pool.
I went to her, all my worship in my face; I worked with her at her task.
Together we pulled the weed, we set the lilies free. High-minded as a
goddess, she revealed herself to me. I was the postulant, dumb before
the mysteries; I adored without a thought. I was nothing, could be
nothing, to her but her lover--and now _she wants me, and I must go to
her._
"For two years I was close to her side--either I or my words never left
her. She became humble, suffered me to lead her, opened to me her
mind, shared with me her secret thoughts. I told her the truth; I hid
nothing from the first. From the first day she knew that I loved her.
There was no presumption in this--I asked nothing, expected nothing. I
told her often that I looked forward to her wedded state--and then it
came, and I was not ready for it as it came. Horrible thing, her nobility
was her punishment. She has suffered, she suffers; _she wants me, and
I must go to her._
"How am I to go, tied and bound as I am? What can I do? I have been
false to my vows. I belong in duty to another world, to another woman,
who can command me as she will. I don't know, I don't see. I know
only one thing, and see only her, calling me with her inflexibly grave
eyes. _She wants me, and I must go