I'm afraid I can't quite say what, after that, I at first did, nor just how I immediately profited by our separation.I felt absurdly excited, though this indeed was what I had felt all day; there had been in fact deepening degrees of it ever since my first mystic throb after finding myself, the day before in our railway-carriage, shut up to an hour's contemplation and collation, as it were, of Gilbert Long and Mrs.Brissenden.I have noted how my first full contact with the changed state of these associates had caused the knell of the tranquil mind audibly to ring for me.I have spoken of my sharpened perception that something altogether out of the common had happened, independently, to each, and I could now certainly flatter myself that I hadn't missed a feature of the road I had thus been beguiled to travel.It was a road that had carried me far, and verily at this hour I FELT far.I daresay that for a while after leaving poor Briss, after what I may indeed call launching him, this was what I predominantly felt.To be where I was, to whatever else it might lead, treated me by its help to the taste of success.It appeared then that the more things I fitted together the larger sense, every way, they made a remark in which I found an extraordinary elation.It justified my indiscreet curiosity;it crowned my underhand process with beauty.The beauty perhaps was only for ME--the beauty of having been right; it made at all events an element in which, while the long day softly dropped, I wandered and drifted and securely floated.This element bore me bravely up, and my private triumph struck me as all one with the charm of the moment and of the place.
There was a general shade in all the lower reaches--a fine clear dusk in garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless wood and chimnied roof, rose into golden air.The last calls of birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again.I scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in the grounds of some castle of enchantment.I had positively encountered nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy-tales and of the childish imagination of the impossible.THEN I used to circle round enchanted castles, for then I moved in a world in which the strange "came true." It was the coming true that was the proof of the enchantment, which, moreover, was naturally never so great as when such coming was, to such a degree and by the most romantic stroke of all, the fruit of one's own wizardry.I was positively--so had the wheel revolved--proud of my work.I had thought it all out, and to have thought it was, wonderfully, to have brought it.Yet I recall how I even then knew on the spot that there was something supreme I should have failed to bring unless I had happened suddenly to become aware of the very presence of the haunting principle, as it were, of my thought.
This was the light in which Mrs.Server, walking alone now, apparently, in the grey wood and pausing at sight of me, showed herself in her clear dress at the end of a vista.It was exactly as if she had been there by the operation of my intelligence, or even by that--in a still happier way--of my feeling.My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her, was assuredly emotion.Yet what WAS this feeling, really?--of which, at the point we had thus reached, I seemed to myself to have gathered from all things an invitation to render some account.
Well, I knew within the minute that I was moved by it as by an extraordinary tenderness; so that this is the name I must leave it to make the best of.
It had already been my impression that I was sorry for her, but it was marked for me now that I was sorrier than I had reckoned.All her story seemed at once to look at me out of the fact of her present lonely prowl.
I met it without demur, only wanting her to know that if I struck her as waylaying her in the wood, as waiting for her there at eventide with an idea, I shouldn't in the least defend myself from the charge.I can scarce clearly tell how many fine strange things I thought of during this brief crisis of her hesitation.I wanted in the first place to make it end, and while I moved a few steps toward her I felt almost as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird or stalking a fawn.My few steps brought me to a spot where another perspective crossed our own, so that they made together a verdurous circle with an evening sky above and great lengthening, arching recesses in which the twilight thickened.Oh, it was quite sufficiently the castle of enchantment, and when I noticed four old stone seats, massive and mossy and symmetrically placed, I recognised not only the influence, in my adventure, of the grand style, but the familiar identity of this consecrated nook, which was so much of the type of all the bemused and remembered.We were in a beautiful old picture, we were in a beautiful old tale, and it wouldn't be the fault of Newmarch if some other green carrefour, not far off, didn't balance with this one and offer the alternative of niches, in the greenness, occupied by weather-stained statues on florid pedestals.
I sat straight down on the nearest of our benches, for this struck me as the best way to express the conception with which the sight of Mrs.