Chapter 5

I

A notable difference between the sexes is this: that a man will thrive for years--that is, his better part--upon love denied, and woman upon love fulfilled. So Senhouse, in his hopeless plight, starved and did well; dreams nourished him in what passes in England for solitude. From the grey of the mornings to the violet-lidded dusk his silence was rarely broken; and yet the music in his heart was continuous; his routine marched to a rhythm. The real presence of Sanchia was always with him, to intensify, accentuate, and make reasonable the perceptions of his quickened senses. Sense blended with sense--as when the sharp fragrance of the thyme which his feet crushed gave him the vision of her immortal beauty, or when, in the rustle of the wind-swept grasses, he had a consciousness of her thrilled heart beating near by. All nature, in fact, was vocal of Sanchia by day; and at night, presently, she stole white-footed down the slant rays of the moon and fed his soul upon exhalations of her own. Idle as he might have appeared to one who did not know the man--for beyond the routine of his handiwork he did nothing visible--he was really intensely busy. Out of the stores reaped and garnered in those meditative years was to come the substance of his after-life.

But no man in England may live three years in a grass valley unreported; his fame will spread abroad, scattered as birds sow seeds. Discreetly as he lived and little as he fared, he was at first a thing of doubt and suspicion, and won respect by slow degrees. Was he a coiner, stirring alloys over his night fires? Was he Antichrist, blaspheming the Trinity at daybreak? He was talked of by gaitered farmers at sheep-fairs, by teamsters at cross-roads, by maidens and their sweethearts on Sundays. The shepherds, it was thought, might have told more than they did. It was understood that they had caught him at his secrets times and again. But the shepherds had little to say of him but that he was a mellow man, knowing sheep and weather, and not imparting all that he knew. Similarly the gypsies, who alone travel the Race-plain in these days, and mostly by night, were believed to know him well; but they, too, kept their lore within the limits of their own shifty realm.

Rarely, indeed, he was seen. Sunday lovers, strolling hand in hand up the valley, came to a point where they went tiptoe and peered about for him. He might be described motionless, folded in his white robe, midway between ridge and hollow; or a gleam of him flashed between the trees of the brake would perhaps be all that they would get for an hour of watching. The hill brows would, on such days, be lined with patient onlookers; all eyes would be up the narrow valley to its head under Hirlebury, where, below the little wood, his grey hut could be seen, deep-eaved, mysterious, blankly holding its secrets behind empty windows. None ever ventured to explore at close quarters; and if the tenant had appeared, a thousand to one they would all have looked the other way. The Wiltshire peasant is a gentleman from the heart outwards. So, too, carters, ploughmen, reapers in the vales would sometimes see his gaunt figure monstrous on the sky-line, cowled and with uplifted arms, adoring (it was supposed) the sun, or leaning on his staff, motionless and rapt, meditating death and mutability. He lost nothing by such change apparitions; on the contrary, he gained the name of a wise man who had powers of divination and healing. In the cottage whither he went once a week for bread, a child had been sick of a burning fever. His hands, averred the mother, had cured it. Groping and making passes over its stomach, rubbing in oils, relief had come, then quiet sleep and a cool forehead. After this an old man, crippled with rheumatics, had hobbled up to the very edge of his dominion, and had waited shaking there upon his staff until he could get speech with the white stranger. He, too, had had the reward of his relief. If he was not made sound again, he was relieved and heartened. He had said that, if he was spared, he was hopeful to stretch to his height again, which had been six feet all but an inch. The stranger, said he, had put him in the way of new life, and whatever he might mean--whether that he were a Salvationist or a quack doctor--he would say no more. After that, a young woman went to him to get him to name the father of her child, and returned, and was modest for a month, and a good mother when the time came. And true it was that her chap came forward and saw the vicar about it, and that they were asked in church. Out of such things as these his fame grew.

The hunt struck upon him now and again, when the hounds in full cry streamed down his steep escarpments and threatened panic to his browsing goats. At such times he would rise up, white-robed and calm, as stay with a quiet gesture the scattering beasts. The whips would cap him, and the Master with his field find themselves in company of an equal. For his ease of manner never left him, nor that persuasive smile which made you think that the sun was come out. He had none of the airs of mystagogue, but talked to men, as he did to beasts, in the speech which was habitual to them. The lagging fox understood him when, grinning his fear and fatigue, he drew himself painfully through the furze. So did the hounds, athirst for his blood. Buck-skinned gentlemen, no less, found him affable and full of information--about anything and everything in the world except the line of the hunted fox. “Oh, come,” he said once, “don't ask me to give him away. You're fifty to one, to start with; and the fact is I passed him my word that I wouldn't. I'll tell you what though. You shall offer me a cigarette. I haven't smoked for six days.” Which was done.

His powers with children, his charm for them, his influence and fascination, which in course of time made him famous beyond these shores, arose out of a chance encounter not far from his hut. Three boys, breaking school in the nesting season, came suddenly upon him, and paled, and stood rooted. “Come on,” he said, “I'll show you a thing or two that you've never seen before.” He led them to places of marvel, which his speech made to glimmer with the hues of romance: the fresh grubbed earth where a badger had been routing, the quiet glade where, that morning, a polecat had washed her face. He brought them up to a vixen and her cubs, and got them all playing together. He let them hold leverets in their arms, milk his goats, as the kids milk them for their need; and showed them so much of the ways of birds that they forgot, while they were under the spell of him, to take any of their eggs. Crowning wonder of all--when a peewit, waiting on the down, dipped and circled about his head for a while and finally perched on his shoulder while he stood looking down upon her eggs in the bents! Such deeds as these fly broadcast over the villages, and on Saturdays he would be attended by a score of urchins, boys and girls. To a gamekeeper who came out after his lad, sapling ash in hand, he had that to say which convinced the man of his authority.

“'A says to me, 'There's a covey of ten in thicky holler,' where you could see neither land nor bird. 'I allow 'tis ten,' he says, 'but we won't be particular to a chick.' There was nine, if you credit me, that rose out of a kind of a dimple in the down, that you couldn't see, and no man could see. 'Lord love you,' I said, 'Mr. John, how ever did you see 'em?' He looks at me, and he says, very quiet, 'I never saw the birds, nor knew they was there. I saw the air. There's waves in this air,' he says, 'wrinkled waves; and they birds stirred 'em, like stones flung into a pond. Tom,' he says, to my Tom, 'if you look as close as I do,' he says, 'you'll see what I see.' And young Tom looks up at him, as a dog might, kind of faithful, and he says, 'I 'low I will, sir, please, sir.' I says to him, 'Can a man be taught the like o' that?' 'No,' says he, 'but a boy can.' 'What more could thicky boy learn?' I says, and he says, 'To understand his betters, and get great words, and do without a sight of things--for the more you do without,' he says, 'the more you have to deal with.' 'Such things as what, now, would he do without?' I wants to know. He looks at me. 'Food,' he says, kind of sharp; 'food when he's hungry, and clothing, and a bed; and money, and the respect of them that don't know anything, and other men's learning, and things he don't make for himself.' Heard any man ever the like o' that? But just you bide till I've done. 'Can a boy learn to do without drink?' I wants to know--for beer's been my downfall. 'He can,' says thicky man. 'And love?' I says; and 'No,' says he straight, 'he cannot. But he can learn the way of it; and that 'ull teach him to do wi'out lust.' 'Tis a wise thought, the like of that, I allow.”

The gamekeeper paused for the murmurs of his auditory to circle about the tap-room, swell and subside, and then brought out his conclusion. There was book-learning to be faced. “How about scholarship? 'I'd give him none,' says the man. 'Swallerin' comes by nature, and through more than the mouth. I'd open him his eyes and ears, his fingers and toes, and the very hairs on the backs of his hands; and they'll all swaller in time, like the parts of the beastes do.' Now, that's a learned man, I allow. My boy must go to the Council School it does appear; but thicky man will give him more teaching in a week than school-master in a year--and there he goes o' Saturdays--and wants no driving, moreover.” He returned to his beer, thoughtful-eyed.

The gamekeeper's son was twelve years old, and was the nucleus round which grew the Senhusian school of a later day, where neither reading nor writing could be had until the pupil was fifteen years old. But this is anticipatory, for the school was a matter of long gestation and tentative birth.

II

One September midnight, as he stirred a late supper over a small wood-fire, he was hailed by a cry from above. “Ho, you! I ask shelter,” he was adjured. The quarter moon showed him a slim figure dark against the sky.

“Come down, and you shall have it,” he answered, and continued to skim his broth.

The descent was painfully made, and it was long before the traveller stood blinking by his fire--a gaunt and hollow-eyed lad. Senhouse took him in at a glance, stained, out-at-elbows with the world, nursing a grudge, footsore and heartsore. He had a gypsy look, and yet had not a gypsy serenity. That is a race that is never angry at random; and never bitter at large. A gypsy will want a man's life; but if the man is not before him, will be content to wait until he is. But this wanderer seemed to have a quarrel with time and place, that they held not his enemy by the gullet.

“You travel late, my friend,” said Senhouse briskly.

“I travel by night,” said the stranger, “lest I should be seen by men or the sun.”

Senhouse laughed. “_In girum imus noctu, non ut consumimur igni_.' They used to say that of the devils once upon a time. Devilish bad Latin; but it reads backwards as well as forwards, like the devil himself.”

“My devil rides on my back,” said the stranger, “and carries with him the fire that roasts me.”

He was at once bitter and sententious. Senhouse put down his hurts to bruises of the self-esteem.

“I hope that you dropped him up above,” he said cheerfully, “or that you will let me exorcise him. I've tried my hand with most kinds of devil. Are you a Roman?”

“Half,” he was told, and, guessing which half, asked no more questions.

“You are pretty well done, I can see,” he said. “You want more food. You want warm water, and a bed, and a dressing for your feet. You've been on the road too long.”

The stranger was huddled by the fire, probing his wounded feet. “I'm cut to pieces,” he said. “I've been over stubbles and flint. This is a cruel country.”

“It's the sweetest in the world,” Senhouse told him, “when you know your way about it. When you have the hang of it you need not touch the roads. You smell out the hedgerows, and every borstal leads you out on to the grass. But I'll own that there are thistles. I wear sandals myself. Now,” he continued, ladling out of his pot with a wooden spoon, “here's your porridge, and there are bread and salt; and here water, and here goat's milk. Afterwards you shall have a pipe of tobacco, and some tea. Best begin while all's hot--and while you eat I'll look to your wounds. Finally, you shall be washed and clothed.”

He went away, returning presently with water and a napkin. Kneeling, he bathed his guest's feet, wiped them, anointed, then wrapped them up in the napkin. The disconsolate one, mean-time, was supping like a wolf. He gulped at his porridge with quick snaps, tore his bread with his teeth. Senhouse gave him time, quietly eating his own supper, watching the red gleam die down in the poor wretch's eyes. Being himself a spare feeder, he was soon done, and at further business of hospitality. He set a great pipkin of water to heat, brought out a clean robe of white wool, a jelab like his own, and made some tea.

The stranger, then, being filled, cleansed and in warm raiment, stretched himself before the fire, and broke silence. He was still surly, but the grudge was not audible in his voice. “I took your fire for a gypsy camp, and was glad enough of it. I've come by the hills from Winterslow since dusk. You were right, though: I was done. I couldn't have dragged another furlong.”

Senhouse nodded. “I thought not. Been long on the road?”

“Two months.”

“From the North, I think? From Yorkshire?”

The stranger grunted his replies. His host judged that he had reasons for his reticence. There was a pause.

“You sup late,” was then observed.

Senhouse replied, “I generally do. I take two meals a day--the first at noon, the second at midnight; but I believe that I could do without one of them. I never was much of an eater--and I need very little sleep. Somehow, although I am out at sunrise most mornings, I rarely sleep till two or thereabouts. Four hours are enough for me--and in the summer much less. Sometimes, when the fit is on me, I roam all night long, and come back and do my routine--and then sleep where I am, or may be. Precisians would grow mad at such a life--and yet I'm awfully healthy.”

The stranger watched him. “You live here, then--and so?”

“I have lived here,” said Senhouse, “for three years or more; but I've lived so for over twenty. I've wandered for most of that time, and know England from end to end; but now I seem to have got into a backwater, and I find that I travel farther, and see more, than I did when I was hardly for a week together in the same place. But that's reason-able enough, if you think of it. If you can do with-out time, space goes with it. If it don't matter _when_ you are, it don't matter _where_.”

The stranger lent this reasoning his gloomy meditation, which turned it inwards to himself and his rueful history. “I don't follow you, I believe,” he said, “for very good reason. I hope you will never learn as I have that it does matter where you are.” He stopped, then added, as if the admission was wrung out of him, “I've been in prison.”

“So have I,” said Senhouse, “and in Siberia at that. I was there for more than a year, though not all that time within walls. They let me loose when they found that I could be trusted, and I learned botany, and caught a marsh fever which nearly finished me. They wouldn't have me in after that, being quite content that I should rot in the open. I was succoured by a woman, one of those noble creatures who are made to give themselves. She gave me what blood she had left. God bless her: she blessed me.”

“It was a woman,” said the stranger, “that sent me to prison.”

Senhouse, after looking him over, calmly replied, “I don't believe you. You mean, I think, that there was a woman, and you went to prison. You confuse her and your feelings about her. It is natural, but not very fine-mannered. No woman would have put the thing as you have put it to me.”

The stranger shifted two or three times under his host's quiet regard: presently he said, “This is the tale in a nutshell. She was beautiful and kind to me; she was in a hateful place, and I loved her--and she knew it. There was a man with claims--rights he had none--preposterous claims, made infamous by his acts. The position was impossible, intolerable. She knew it, but did nothing. Women are like that--endlessly enduring; but men are not. I dragged him off a horse and thrashed him. He had me to gaol, and she went her ways, leaving a note for me, hoping I should do well. Do well! Much she cares what I do. Much care I.” He ended with a sob which was like the cough of a wolf at night, and then turned his face away.

“Why should she care,” asked Senhouse, “what becomes of you? By your act you dropped yourself out of her sphere. If she was to be degraded, as you call it, by whom was she degraded? But you talk there a language which I don't understand. You say that she was beautiful, and I suppose you know what you mean by the word. How then is a beautiful person to be degraded by anything the likes of you, or your fellow-dog, do to her? The thing's absurd. You can't claw her soul or blacken the edges of that. You can't sell that into prostitution or worse. That is her own, and it's that which makes her beautiful,--in spite of the precious pair of you, bickering and mauling each other to possess her. Possess her, poor fool! Can you possess moonlight? If you have degraded anything, you have degraded yourself. She remains where she is, entirely out of your reach.”

The young man now turned his trapped and wretched face to the speaker. “You little know--” he began, then for weakness stopped. “I can't quarrel with you; wait till I've had a night's rest.”

“You shall have it, and welcome,” said Senhouse. “But you'll never quarrel with me. I believe I've got beyond that way of enforcing arguments which I fear may be unsound. I doubt if I have quarrelled with anybody for twenty years.”

“There are some things which no man can stand,” said the other, “and that was one. Your talk of the soul is very fine; but do you say that you don't love a woman's body as well as her soul?”

Senhouse was silent for a while; then he said, “No,--I can't say that. You have me there. I ought to, but I can't. And I think I owe you an apology for my heat, for the fact is that I've been in much of your position myself. There was a man once upon a time that I felt like thrashing--for much of your reason. But I didn't do it--for what seemed to me unanswerable reason. I did precisely the opposite--I did everything I could to ensure a miserable marriage for the being I loved best in all the world. I loathed the man, I loathed the bondage; but that's what I did. Now mark what follows. I didn't--I couldn't--degrade her; but I saw myself dragging like a worm in the mud while she soared out of my reach. And there I've been--of the slime slimy ever since. Where she is now I don't know, but I think in heaven. Heaven lay in her eyes--and whenever I look at the sky at night I see her there.”

“You are talking above my head,” said the stranger, “or above your own. Either I am a fool, or you a madman. You love a woman, and give her to another man? You love her, and secure her in slavery? You love her, and don't want her?”

“It is I that am the fool, not you,” said Senhouse. “I do want her. I want nothing else in earth or heaven. And yet I know that I have her for ever. Our souls have touched each other. She is mine and I am hers. And yet I want her.”

“Won't you get her? Don't you believe that you will?”

“God knows! God knows!”

“She was beautiful?”

“The dawn,” said Senhouse, “was not more purely lovely than she. The dawn was in her face--the awfulness of it as well as its breathless beauty.”

“My mistress,” said the young man, “had the gait of a goddess in the corn. One thought of Demeter in the wheat. She was like ivory under the moon. She laughed rarely, but her voice was low and thrilled.”

“Her breath,” Senhouse continued, “was like the scent of bean-flowers. She sweetened the earth. It is true that she laughed seldom, but when she did the sun shone from behind a cloud. When she was silent you could hear her heart beat. She was deliberate, measured in all that she did--yet her spirit was as swift as the south-west wind. She did nothing that was not lovely, and never faltered in what she purposed. When first I came to know her and see the workings of her noble mind, I was so happy in the mere thought of her that I sang all day as I worked or walked. It never entered me for one minute that I could desire anything but the knowledge of her.”

“I wanted my mistress altogether,” the other broke in, “from the first moment to the last--fool, and wicked fool, as you may think me. I could see her bosom stir her gown--I could see the lines of her as she walked. She was kind to me, I tell you, and there were times when--alone with her--in her melting mood--in the wildness of my passion--but no! something held me: I never dared touch her.... And then he--the other--came back; he, with his 'claims' and 'rights'; and the thought of him, and what he could do--and did do--made me blind. You tell me that I sinned against her--”

“I don't,” said Senhouse. “I tell you that you sinned against love. You don't know what love is.”

“You say so. Maybe you know nothing about it. If you have reduced yourself to be contented with the soul of a woman, I have not. What have I to do with the soul?”

“Evidently nothing,” said Senhouse. “How, pray, do you undertake to apprehend body's beauty unless you discern the soul in it--on which it shapes its beauty?”

“I know,” the other replied, “that she has a lovely body, and gracious, free-moving ways; and I could have inferred her soul from them. I'll engage that you did the same thing. How are you to judge of the soul but by the hints which the body affords you?”

Senhouse made no answer, but remained musing. When he spoke it was as if he was resuming a tale half-told....

“She was in white--white as a cloud--and in a wood. Her hair reflected gold of the sun. She pinned her skirts about her waist, and put her bare foot into a pool of black water. She sank in it to the knee. She did not falter: her eyes were steady upon what she did.”

The stranger took him up where he stopped, and continued the tale. “She could never falter in her purpose. She bared herself to the thighs. She went into the pool thigh-deep. Whiter than the lilies which she went to save, she raked the weed from them--you helping her.”

“She did,” said Senhouse, his eyes searching the fire. “And when, afterwards, she did what her heart bade her, she never faltered either, though she steeped her pure soul in foulness compared to which the black water was sweet. But do you suppose that any evil handling would stain her? You fool! You are incapable of seeing a good woman. In the same breath with which I spurned myself for having a moment's fear for her, I thanked God for having let me witness her action.”

The rebuke was accepted, not because it was felt to be justified; but rather, it passed unheeded. The stranger had questions to ply.

“Knowing her, loving her--loveworthy as she was--how could you leave her?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Senhouse, “I have never left her.” But in the next breath he had to qualify his paradox.

He spoke vehemently. “I had of her all that I dared have. That has never left me. I had all that she could give me--she that was self-sufficing, not to be imparted. She did not love me, as you could understand love: I don't think she could love anybody. But I only could read her thoughts and grasp her troubles for her. She was at ease with me, let me write to her, was glad to see me when I came, but perfectly able to do without me. She was, of course, not human; she inhabited elsewhere. Her 'soul was like a star and dwelt apart.' She remembered things as they had been, yet not as affecting her to pleasure or pain; she remembered them as a tale that is told, as things witnessed. So she remembered me--and so she still does. If I was there, with her, she was glad; if I was not there, she wasn't sorry. I was nothing to her but a momentary solace--and I knew it and taught myself to be contented. I believe that she was the spirit of immortal youth fleeting over the world. I called her Hymnia. What Beatrice was to Dante, the visible incarnation of his dream of holiness, such was she to me. I picture her and Beatrice together in heaven.

'In the clear spaces of heaven, As sisters and lovers, sit Beatrice and Thou embraced-- Hand and hand, waist and waist, And smile at the worship given By Earth, and the men in it To whom you were manifest.'

I quote my own poetry, because, oddly enough, nobody else has remarked upon the fact.”

He continued: “When she did what it pleased her to do, it was said by fools that I had inspired her. Fool among fools, I thought so myself at the time, and moved Earth and Heaven, and Hell and Ingram, to save her from an act of magnanimity the like of which I have never heard of. Bless you! if I had never lived, she would have acted as she did, because she was incapable of seeing evil, incapable of acting against her heart. Well! and the thing was done--and I had to face it. I had it all out with myself, and decided that no harm could come to her. From that hour I have never seen her with my waking eyes. Yet she is here. She is always here....

“My answer to you is simple. I have all of her of which I am capable. I have never left her because she has never left me....

“I wrote out my heart in my first years of knowing her; but since then I have gone under the harrow of this world, where there can be no singing. Now that I am at peace my voice has come back. I listen to what she tells me, and note it. Like Dante, _vo significando:_ I am a drain-pipe for her spirit. She was Hymnia to me once, and I sang of Open Country; now she is Despoina, Mistress of the Night. Words come thronging to me, phrases, rhythms; but not Form. I shall get out a poem one of these days--when the harrow rests. And that will be its name: Rest Harrow.”

He broke out after a pause-“Her beauty! What is it to the purpose to put its semblance into words? Its significance is the heart of the matter. We see the earth as hill and valley, pasture and cloud, sky and sea. Really it is nothing of the kind, but infinitely more. It is tireless energy, yearning, force, profusion, terror, immutability in variety. What are words to such a power? It is to _that_ I stretch out my arms. I must lie folded in that immensity, drown and sink in it, till it and I are one. I must be resumed into the divine energy whose appearance is but a broken hint of it. So it is with Her: not what she appears, but what she stands for is the miracle. Her beauty is not in dimple and curve, though her breasts are softer than the snowy hills, and the liquor of her mouth sweeter than honey of limes. If I lay on the floor of the Aegean and looked up to the sun I should not see such blue as glimmers in her eyes. But these are figures, halting symbols. Her form, her glow, her eager, lovely breath are her soul put into speech for us to read. You might say that her nobility was that of the Jungfrau on a night of stars. So her body's beauty is but a poem written by God about her soul.”

Glyde sat up and looked at him across the fire. “I know you. There is but one man who has loved her as you do. You are her poet. You are Senhouse.”

Senhouse nodded. “That is my name. You know her, then?” His face glowed darkly. “You have known her--you!”

“I saw her four months ago. I was in servitude in a house where she too was made a servant. For her sake, I tell you again, I downed Ingram.”

Senhouse said sharply, “It was for your own. You aren't fit to talk to her. You have unclean lips. You don't hurt her, for you cannot. You hurt yourself infinitely. Why, a dog would do as you did, and possibly be right; but you, not being a dog, have broken your own rules. You have trodden on your own honour, and, like the dull fool that you are, come out wrapped in your silly self-esteem as if it was a flag. I wish that you could see yourself as I see you--or rather I hope you never may; for if you did you would see no reason to live.” The words, frozen with scorn, cut like hailstones. The guest cowered, with the whip about his face. Senhouse rose.

“Follow me,” he said.

Glyde also rose to his feet, and, as if he was giddy, looked blankly about him. “O God, what have I done? O God, what am I?” He dashed his hand over his eyes. “I can't see. I suppose I never could.” He turned upon Senhouse. “You! Why do you harbour such a rat as I?”

Senhouse gave him pitiful eyes. “If you think yourself a rat, you are in the way to be more. Come, we will be friends yet. You're near the end of your tether, I think. Let me tuck you into a blanket.”

III

In the morning Glyde, in a humble mood, drank quantities of small beer. In other words, he told his story of Sanchia, of Ingram, and of Mrs. Wilmot. He was so steered by questions from Senhouse that he came, towards the end, to see that if any one had driven his mistress into a life of bondage to Ingram it was himself and his presumptuous arm.

“You must have offended her beyond expression,” he was told. “First, her fine esteem in her own spotless robe, which you have smeared with beastly blood and heat; next, her sense of reason clear as day; next, and worst, her logical faculty by which she sees it to be a law of the earth that nothing can be bought without a price. Oh, you precious young donkey! And who the mischief are you, pray, to meddle in the affairs of high ladies--you who can't manage your own better than to do with your foolish muscles what is the work of a man's heart? Love! You don't know how to spell the word. But I am getting angry again, and I don't want to do that. I'll tell you what I shall do with you. You shall stay with me here till you are well, and then you shall go to London and find Despoina--”

“Do you mean Sanchia?” Glyde was still unregenerate at heart.

“I mean whom I say, your mistress and mine. You are not fit to name her by any other name.”

“No, no--I know it,” said the youth; “but her name is so beautiful.”

“Everything about her is beautiful,” said Senhouse, “therefore see that you go to her cleansed and sweetened. Now, when you have found her you shall beg her pardon on your knees--”

“Never!” said Glyde, grittily in his teeth.

“On your heart's knees, you fool,” cried Senhouse, with a roar which rolled about the hills. “On the knees of your rat's heart. You shall beg her pardon on your knees for your beastly interference, presumption, mulishness, and graceless manhood; and then you shall leave her immediately, and thank God for the breath of her forgiveness. This also is important. You are not to name me who have sent you.” His eyes shone with the gleam of tears. “Never name me to her, young Glyde, for I'll tell you now that for every stripe I've dusted your jacket with you owe me forty--and you can lay on when you please.”

“For I,” he continued, after a pause for breath, while Glyde stared fearfully upon him, “for I, too, have betrayed her.”

They said no more at that time, but all day Glyde followed Senhouse about like a dog.

In the evening of what to the undrilled youth was a hard-spent day, Senhouse unfolded his heart and talked long and eloquently of love and other mysteries of our immortal life.

“The attainment of our desires,” he said, “appears to every one of us to be a Law of Nature, and so, no doubt, it is. But that is equally valid which says, 'To every man that which he is fit to enjoy.' The task of men is to reconcile the two. That once done you are whole--nay, you are holy.”

“I believe that I am in the way of that salvation, look you, for I know now that there is hardly a thing upon the earth which I cannot do without. That being so, and all things of equal value, or of no value, _I have them all_. They are at the disposal of that part of myself which enters no markets and cannot be chaffered away. Wind, rain, and sun have bleached me; dinners of herbs have reduced my flesh to obedience; incessant toil, with meditation under the stars, have driven my thoughts along channels graved deep by patient plodding of the field. I am become one with Nature. I have watched the wheeling of the seasons until, to escape vertigo, I picture myself as a fixed point, and see the spheres in their courses revolve about me.”

Mystic sayings, aphorisms oozed from him like resin from a pine.

“It is error to suppose that discomfort is holy. Holiness is harmony. Men have lost sight of the sanctity of the body. Rightly considered, indigestion is a great sin.”

“Passion, which is a state of becoming, is not holy, for holiness is a state of being. But it is noble, because it is a straining after appeasement, which is a harmony.

“Man is an ape, or a god, but certainly a god in this, that he can make himself either. It is by no means certain, however, that this potentiality is not also possessed by the ape.

“Appeasement of passion is fulfilment of our being, which out of ferment makes wine, though riot seeks rest.”

He was not always so transcendental. Here we have him closer to the matter.

“A woman when she loves is a seraph winged. When she does not she is a chrysalis, a husk, or a shell. In love she follows the man, but appears to fly him, as a shepherd goes before the sheep he is really driving. Out of it she is an empty vase, to be revered by us for the sacred wine which she may hold, as a priest handles fearfully the chalice.

“She has but one law, the law of her love, which says to her, 'Give, give, give.' See here how she differs from the man, to whom love is but one of many healthy appetites--not a divine mission. Love, hunger, hunting, or a taste for picture-dealing, say to him, 'Take, take.'

“Yet it is no wonder that the sexes go in fear of each other, each a mystery to each. For my part, I have never been close to a woman without a desire to cover my eyes.”

And here he got level with her, and showed her radiant beside him.

“A young woman with shining eyes, blown-back hair and face on fire, holding out her heart from the threshold, stretching it out at arms' length, crying, 'Who will take this? To whom may I give it?' A vision here of Heaven's core of light. I have seen it. I, Senhouse, have seen the Holy Grail.

“She stood with me upon the threshold of the world, just so, with blown-back hair and shining eyes. Blessed one, blessed prodigal! She poured out her heart like water-for a dog to lap. He was dog-headed, full in the eye, a rich feeder. She decked him with the fair garlands of her thoughts, she made him glisten with her holy oils. She crowned him with starry beams from her eyes, she sweetened him with the breath of her pure prayers. She robed him in white and scarlet, for he was wrapped in her soul and sprinkled with her passion. And she said, 'I love a divine person. I am ready to die for him. Make haste. Pile the fire, sharpen the knife; bind me with cords, and drive deep. I die that he may live.' O Gods, and Sanchia gave herself for Nevile Ingram!”

He was never alone, it appeared, for she was with him constantly, a vivifying principle. He had ensphered her in light; she was unassailable--his fly in amber. Ingram, Chevenix, all Wanless, might have daily converse with her, and one might grudge her her self-sufficiency, and another see her a pretty girl in a mess. To him she was a fairy in harness, “a lovely lady garmented in light,” to whom the rubs of the world could do no harm. She wore crystal armour. They did not know her, could not see her, those who used her for their elemental needs. “Her soul was like a star and dwelt apart.”

He told young Glyde that he had reached this transcendental eyrie of his by painful degrees. No person of Sanchia's acquaintance had suffered more than he by her desperate affair. He had been her first lover, and her only confidant, for she had been what one calls a “difficult” girl, who gave out nothing and had no friends. Her sisters knew very little about her, her mother nothing. It had been Senhouse who had called up the spirit that was in her--that extraordinary candour of vision which shrank from the judgment of nothing in heaven or earth “upon the merits.” He had himself been at first amazed by her quality; but before he had discovered it he had adored her; so it had seemed all of a piece with her exquisite perfection. That first sight he had had of her, in the sun-dappled woodland glade, with her gown above her knees, setting her foot in the unknown depths of a black pool--that she might rescue lilies from suffocation--was surely typical of that which followed--when, barely twenty-one, she trod deliberately, in her world's shocked face, a road which leads without return to a point at which the world says, “I cannot see you, you are dead.” But she had never faltered, had seen no shame, and felt none. Nevile was unhappy, and needed her. If there was no other way of serving him, she must take that way. So she told him, Senhouse, her only friend; and he cried aloud in his agony, “God save her,” while his soul was saying, “Beatrice never shrank from hell, nor ever looked back. No more, God be thanked, does Sanchia.” When the thing was done, and she had gone with unbowed head into the deeps, he had known his hours of desolation; but from that hour she had stood for him “a thing enskied and sainted.” He felt that he was set apart for her worship, and only regretted that Beatrice had had a better poet for the business than Sanchia could ever hope for.

For a year after her flight he continued a correspondence with her which had begun with their first acquaintance; and then he had stopped it, not she. His reason shall be admitted, to his credit or not. It appeared that she read his letters, as they came, to Nevile Ingram--she told him so--and, further, that Ingram was bored. Sanchia did not tell him that, but he gathered it; and whether he felt that the intimacy was fatally invaded, or whether he was piqued--he stopped. Within two years or so from that he wrote once more to tell her that he was about to “join fortunes” with Mary Germain, a young widow.

She knew what he meant by that; he was too much of a poet to be anything but shocked at the marriage-bond. She hoped the best for him, but his