“Thank Heaven, that’s over!” she observed; “a tea-and-shrimp affair. Blanche, I believe you enjoyed yourself.”
“Had some rattling tennis and a smack at Mrs. Marjoy. Really, old Mince keeps his grass in better order than his parish.”
“Sir Mark Melluish was the only bearable person I could discover. Gabriel, you must have lunched on suet-pudding. I never saw such a bored creature.”
“These functions always addle my brain. I am beginning to recover.”
“My poor boy,” said Blanche, with a sly twinkle, “see what you have taken upon yourself. Awful responsibility being engaged. You must keep up appearances till you’re married, and then you can be as rude as you like. Only another month or so. Cheer up.”
Gabriel passed half an hour alone with Ophelia in the conservatory that evening. Her humor had changed, and the man’s brain was full of the fumes of her beauty ere she had ended. Gabriel’s window at Gabingly looked southward over the woods towards the sea. A full moon swam in a crystal sky that night, bathing the earth in mysterious splendor. A transcendent calm seemed to have compassed the sun-wearied trees. The world breathed anew under the benisons of the stars, and there was no sound to shake the silver web of sleep.
Gabriel crouched in the window-seat and stared out into the night. The glimmering spirelets of the forest thrust up multitudinous on the hill-side. The dark swell of the moors ran dim and distant beyond the far spirals of the Mallan. A great melancholy had fallen upon the man’s soul. His face shone white in the light of the moon. The cool breeze breathing from the sea seemed savored with a spiritual purity that wounded hope.
Restless visions glimmered in his brain. He saw himself and his own being circled in fire that fed upon his manhood. A girl’s face haunted him; her voice played through the moonlight. He beheld a figure radiant with a divine womanliness moving within the coil of sin and squalor, the sordid earthliness of an unlovely life. Forgotten chivalry had stirred his manhood like some ghostly trumpet-cry out of the past. He breathed out aspirations to the stars, dreams fair and impossibly pathetic. Joan Gildersedge! Joan Gildersedge! To dare, to suffer, to liberate, to love! Life born of sacrifice! Divine passion instinct with the inevitable yearnings of the soul!