第55章

It filled him with a kind of awe, and the feeling was by no means agreeable. It was not a feeling to which even a man of Bernard Longueville's easy power of extracting the savour from a sensation could rapidly habituate himself, and for the rest of that night it was far from making of our hero the happy man that a lover just coming to self-consciousness is supposed to be.

It was wrong--it was dishonorable--it was impossible--and yet it was; it was, as nothing in his own personal experience had ever been.

He seemed hitherto to have been living by proxy, in a vision, in reflection--to have been an echo, a shadow, a futile attempt; but this at last was life itself, this was a fact, this was reality.

For these things one lived; these were the things that people had died for. Love had been a fable before this--doubtless a very pretty one; and passion had been a literary phrase--employed obviously with considerable effect.

But now he stood in a personal relation to these familiar ideas, which gave them a very much keener import; they had laid their hand upon him in the darkness, he felt it upon his shoulder, and he knew by its pressure that it was the hand of destiny.

What made this sensation a shock was the element that was mixed with it; the fact that it came not simply and singly, but with an attendant shadow in which it immediately merged and lost itself.

It was forbidden fruit--he knew it the instant he had touched it.

He felt that he had pledged himself not to do just this thing which was gleaming before him so divinely--not to widen the crevice, not to open the door that would flood him with light.

Friendship and honor were at stake; they stood at his left hand, as his new-born passion stood already at his right; they claimed him as well, and their grasp had a pressure which might become acutely painful. The soul is a still more tender organism than the body, and it shrinks from the prospect of being subjected to violence. Violence--spiritual violence--was what our luxurious hero feared; and it is not too much to say that as he lingered there by the sea, late into the night, while the gurgitation of the waves grew deeper to his ear, the prospect came to have an element of positive terror.

The two faces of his situation stood confronting each other; it was a rigid, brutal opposition, and Bernard held his breath for a while with the wonder of what would come of it.

He sat a long time upon the beach; the night grew very cold, but he had no sense of it. Then he went away and passed before the Casino again, and wandered through the village.

The Casino was shrouded in darkness and silence, and there was nothing in the streets of the little town but the salt smell of the sea, a vague aroma of fish and the distant sound of the breakers.

Little by little, Bernard lost the feeling of having been startled, and began to perceive that he could reason about his trouble.

Trouble it was, though this seems an odd name for the consciousness of a bright enchantment; and the first thing that reason, definitely consulted, told him about the matter was that he had been in love with Angela Vivian any time these three years.

This sapient faculty supplied him with further information; only two or three of the items of which, however, it is necessary to reproduce. He had been a great fool--an incredible fool--not to have discovered before this what was the matter with him!

Bernard's sense of his own shrewdness--always tolerably acute--had never received such a bruise as this present perception that a great many things had been taking place in his clever mind without his clever mind suspecting them.

But it little mattered, his reason went on to declare, what he had suspected or what he might now feel about it; his present business was to leave Blanquais-les-Galets at sunrise the next morning and never rest his eyes upon Angela Vivian again. This was his duty; it had the merit of being perfectly plain and definite, easily apprehended, and unattended, as far as he could discover, with the smallest material difficulties. Not only this, reason continued to remark; but the moral difficulties were equally inconsiderable.

He had never breathed a word of his passion to Miss Vivian--quite the contrary; he had never committed himself nor given her the smallest reason to suspect his hidden flame; and he was therefore perfectly free to turn his back upon her--he could never incur the reproach of trifling with her affections.

Bernard was in that state of mind when it is the greatest of blessings to be saved the distress of choice--to see a straight path before you and to feel that you have only to follow it.

Upon the straight path I have indicated, he fixed his eyes very hard; of course he would take his departure at the earliest possible hour on the morrow. There was a streak of morning in the eastern sky by the time he knocked for re-admittance at the door of the inn, which was opened to him by a mysterious old woman in a nightcap and meagre accessories, whose identity he failed to ascertain; and he laid himself down to rest--he was very tired--with his attention fastened, as I say, on the idea--on the very image--of departure.

On waking up the next morning, rather late, he found, however, that it had attached itself to a very different object. His vision was filled with the brightness of the delightful fact itself, which seemed to impregnate the sweet morning air and to flutter in the light, fresh breeze that came through his open window from the sea.

He saw a great patch of the sea between a couple of red-tiled roofs; it was bluer than any sea had ever been before. He had not slept long--only three or four hours; but he had quite slept off his dread.

The shadow had dropped away and nothing was left but the beauty of his love, which seemed to shine in the freshness of the early day.