Eppie was not there and she had not spoken one word to him since those last words of the afternoon. Perhaps she intended to speak no more, to see him no more. Pausing on the threshold, he was now conscious of a slow, rising misery.
If he was to be spared the final wrench, he was also to be robbed of something. He hadn’t known, till then, of how much. He hadn’t known, while she stood there before him, this fully revealed Eppie, this Eppie who loved far beyond his imagining, far beyond prudence, ambition, even happiness, what it would be not to see her again, to part from her speechlessly, and with a sort of enmity unresolved between them.
The cathedral simile was still with him, not in her interpretation of it, as the consecration of human love, but in his own, as a place of peace, where together they might still kneel in farewell.
But she barred him out from that; she wouldn’t accept such peace. He could only submit and own that she was perhaps altogether right in risking no more battles and in proudly denying to him the opportunity of any reconciling. She was right to have it end there; but the core among the embers ached.
He wandered out into the dark, vague night, sorrowfully restless.
It was not a radiant night. The trees and the long undulations of the moorland melted into the sky, making all about a sea of enveloping obscurity. The moor might have been the sky but for its starlessness; and there were few stars to-night, and these, large and soft, seemed to float like helpless expanded flowers on a still ocean.
A night for wandering griefs to hide in, to feel at one with, and, with an instinct that knew that it sorrowed but hardly knew that it sought, Gavan went on around the house, through the low door in the garden wall, and into the garden.
Here all the warmth and perfume of the summer day seemed still to exhale itself in a long sigh like that of a peaceful sleeper. Earth, trees, fruit, and flowers gave out their drowsy balms. Veiled beauty, dreaming life, were beneath, above, about him, and the high walls inclosed a place of magic, a shadow paradise.
He walked on, past white phlox, white pansies, and white foxglove, through the little trellis where white jasmine starred its festoons of frail, melancholy foliage, and under the low boughs of the small, gnarled fruit-trees. Near the summer-house he paused, looking in at the darkness and seeing there the figures of the past--two children at play. His heart ached on dully, the smoldering sorrow rising neither to passionate regret nor to passionate longing, acquiescing in its own sorrow that was part of the vision. Moved by that retrospect, he stepped inside.