“I would have you know,” he said, “that I am a man bound by chains of my own forging. The blame is mine; I accept it. I may not say, ‘Lo, here is my heart; I may surrender it into the hand of her whose head touches the stars.’ My eyes must remain mute, my soul untongued. I am no longer myself. Think over these words and you may understand in measure.”
Joan Gildersedge did not answer him for several minutes.
“I understand,” she said; “and yet you are not happy.”
“That is the mockery of life. Men think I have everything; I have nothing.”
The sky had darkened; a cloud seemed to have dimmed the sun. A wind woke restless in the woods and the flowers shivered in the waning sunlight. Joan had risen from the altar. She held her hat in her hand, but did not look at Gabriel as he stood in silence at her side.
“I wonder if I shall ever see you again,” she said.
The man had grown pale, and his eyes were stern, yet miserable.
As by a sudden inspiration he kissed her hand as he had kissed it by the Mallan water. When she had left him he remained by the crumbling altar, with its screen of purple nightshade, staring out over the sea. Man-wise, he would have given heaven to have left unsaid the words he had spoken to the girl that day.
The same night he read a letter from Ophelia, a letter garrulous with vapid passion, decreeing the day when they should wed. Gabriel sat by the window as the dusk came down and watched the night embalm the world in gloom. A sonnet fell from his lips as he brooded. He wrote it down, a rough scrawl in the twilight.
“Shall I despair because the day is dead, And all thy strange, sad witchery has passed Into the gold of visions! Shall I cast My soul to where the hands of Night outspread Those cosmic epics, the emotions dread Of panting planets and of stars aghast! Shall I bemoan the raptures that outlast The sun’s swift splendors that so soon are sped!
“Have I not felt the magic of thy hand, And watched the sun make amber of thy hair! Have I not touched thee! For thy laughter planned, And delved thy glances with a grand despair! Never near mine may thy pure bosom sleep. Since thou art woe, then let me live to weep.”
SNOW covered the world, a dense dirge of white sounding deep into the black web of the woods. Clouds moved low in the sky, heavy and morose, unsilvered by the sifting sun. The hills were like the great billows of a milky sea. A silence as of suspense seemed to press ponderous and prophetic upon the land.