CHAPTER XXII

The months after Theresa's departure had been black ones for Alexander. For a time her face lived before him like a flame, but it had been extinguished by the winds of the mountains as he battled through them, and though his hands were burnt, he was glad of the scars. They told him he was stronger than the small vivid woman who had tried to steal his heart and the singleness of mind that meant so much to him. He desired nothing but his work to wife, yet Theresa had come fleetly into his existence, luring him to unfaithfulness. He threw her off, he trained himself to look coldly at the pictures on the mantelpiece, to tell her he had good reason to hate those smiling lips; but at bedtime, when he stood in the glow of the firelight and looked up at her, and bade her his unwilling good-night, he had no heart to leave her gazing into the darkness, and quietly turned her on her face, that she, too, might sleep.

In truth, he could not hate those lips, for they were nobly human, and, with a young wisdom of their own, they defied his hatred, but his resentment against the eager life in her had a healthy bitterness. He could cast her off, but he could not cast out the passions her womanhood had aroused.

There are men as fiercely virginal as any maiden, but this was no quality of Alexander. His disdain of the flesh, and now his loathing of it, came of his desire to be unhampered, untrammelled, the servant of nothing but his mind and spirit: it was the desire of the boy who had fought his temper and controlled his ordinary, wholesome hunger, because he must be supreme. It had been strengthened by experience of his father's weakness and encouraged by the clean solitude of the hills. Walking among them, lifting his feet high to overcome the heather, he had trampled, too, on ambition, and believed himself the master of his life; yet Theresa had come and thrown the commonest, most perilously lovely shackles on his hands and feet.

Now, as he walked, he had another foe to conquer, and that was a harder matter, for he had thought himself secure, and lo! his enemy came on him before he was aware. The wildness that he had cloaked with his strength made him a fierce fighter, but the same wildness and the same strength were the qualities he had to combat. He was aghast at the terrible determination of nature. He had seen the torn sides of the hills, he had heard storms, howling round them with awful ruthlessness, but he had known no ruthlessness like this he battled with, that dragged the life from him and left him sunken in eye and cheek so that the raging of the winds was thereafter a little thing to him.

The sight of Janet's pretty Laura was a shameful torture to him; he did not fear her beauty but it rose before him as the very emblem of the thing he dreaded. He drove it off at last, routed it utterly, and lay prone in a mental exhaustion that was like sleep. And into it, as though she were a dream, Theresa came laughing back. He felt no surprise: it seemed she was the thing he had been waiting for. He took her coming as a symbol, a reward for valour, and he welcomed her, but not alone for that. It was her very self he wanted. What choice had he, when he saw her full of courage and comradeship, with eyes that were the doorways to her larger life, and open hands that were like an offering? He took the hands, and as his own tightened on them, as he looked on her, he saw clear. She cleaned his sight, and he knew that arduous fight of his had been more a failure than a triumph. He had not fought for virtue's sake, but for that of his own pride; it was not goodness that he loved, but his own strength, and he was warned that it would have been less a sin had he fallen by his weakness, and not conquered by his strength.

Theresa taught him shame as well as love: the face that was before him was not now a flaming one; it shone with the steady light of her eyes, like truth made manifest.

"It seems I need you," he said to the vision, and the moment when he realized his human need of her was the moment when he first felt, like an inspiration, his divine need of God.

This was in November, more than a year and a half since he had seen Theresa, and this was when his work became a sacrament. He had never lacked in enthusiasm or high purpose, but now, with the fervour of his nature, he offered all he did, through Theresa, up to God. Of these two presences he was always conscious; they were as living as his own heart. Theresa was the high priestess of his temple: it was she who had interceded, she who had handed him the bread of humility to eat. Inevitably, he saw her all spirit for a while, mingled her too freely with the divine, but as he sat by his window on starry winter nights, watching the great bulk of the Blue Hill stand free of the sky, she slipped quietly into her rightful place and, already servant to her bright spirit, he became aware of the holy beauty of her body, and his own love of it. He saw love tearing off the ugly vestments with which men clothe their thoughts, and felt the inseparable fusion of soul and body that love alone can make.

He loved her: he never dreamt that she might not love him. His need was so imperative and so profound that it did not permit of doubt, and his faith was so complete that, without vanity, it presupposed and claimed a like faith in her.

When Edward Webb had gone back to Radstowe and the promise of Easter seemed to be carried the further from Alexander, he found he could not wait so long in silence, and he began to shape a letter for Theresa. He did not set it down in writing, but, as he came and went between the Grammar School and the farm, or watched the tardy spring coming to the mountains, he made the sentences, rounding them fairly, and choosing words that would express his thought and please her ear. He did not tell her of his love, yet he revealed it, for he let her into the very recesses of his mind, the most intimate details of his work were made known to her, he spoke of the strivings of his spirit, and through all his confidences there flashed the bright feet of spring. He told her how the quiet of the valley would soon be shattered, and yet built up, by the penetrating cries of lambs and the bleating mournfulness of their mothers, how the primroses would shine out like eyes from the banks, and the buds would swell and glisten, with the melting of the snow. There was no sight of bird, or beast, or growing thing that he did not register for her and turn into a glowing sentence; no promise of spring but had another, quicker pulse. But though this letter was written at last, it was not sent, for he was a stiff-tongued man, and this inky eloquence seemed to present him falsely, and too fairly, to Theresa. This was a height of correspondence to which he could not always soar, and she must be content with the humdrum lowlands of his life. He tore up the paper on which he had written this careful prose, and taking another sheet, he plunged into an unstudied letter which he did not deign to read when it was done.

"My Dear Theresa,

"I'm watching for the new heather, but it seems long in coming, and will be longer yet. There's the old stuff still on the bushes, but the colour's gone and it's the purple flower I want. Will you not be here to see it flush the hills? But it's months till then, and just now there's little here but snow, and the streams so fierce and heavy that it takes your breath away. I think it's the early morning that I like best, when there's hardly any light but what comes from the snow; and this morning, just at that hour, I was wakened by the stairs creaking, and there was my father going out, half-dressed, and I heard my mother cry out to me to stop him, for he'd taken the razor. We'd had peace for these last weeks, and I'd begun to hope he'd worn himself into quiet, and there he was again, rushing into the snow and the grey morning. It was like chasing a ghost across the fields, for there was no sound on the snow, and the trees looked like spectres that had never known the run of sap. And my mother stood by the gate holding a lantern that gave a little flame the morning mocked at. It was like a lamp showing the door of the underworld I'd rushed into. I came up with him at last, and he laughed at me. He had no razor, he said, and it's true he hadn't, but he'd chosen to frighten my mother with that lie. What are we to do with the man? He threatens to take his life, and if it wasn't for my mother, I think I'd let him do it; but I've got to stop him, and then he laughs at us. I was near knocking him down, but I've always kept my hands off him so far, and I hope I always may. But he's mad, though my mother will not have it. And he is still laughing at his joke. Is it cunning to put us off the scent, I'm wondering?

"When I look back into my life, I see so many pictures of darkness; the night and the sound of his shambling feet coming home, the early morning and the creaking stairs, and my mother calling softly and telling me to stay in bed, for that was when I was young, and he had a spite against me; and the shadows in the kitchen when I did my work, and the moving shadow on the ceiling as my father prowled up and down. The darkness followed me when I went to school in the sun, and when I came back I knew it waited for me. If I went in mist or rain, there was nothing strange in that, for it was just the shadows going with me. Yet I'm exaggerating, for the hills always stood clear of all else, and were themselves and friends to me. Even you, who love them, cannot know what they have been. There's no good name I cannot give them--except one.

"I have written all this about myself, but it's hardly of myself I have been thinking. Indeed, I've written without thought at all, as if my pen knew all that I must say. I've been waiting for that book of yours. Is it coming soon? It's nearly two years since you were here, but I can squeeze all those months up into my hand and throw them from me. Will you send me a letter?

"Alexander."

The day after he had posted this letter to Theresa, he heard from Edward Webb.

"Something has happened which I can hardly believe," he wrote, "which I do not wish to believe. Theresa is to marry a Basil Morton, nephew of the Mr. Smith for whom she works. I know nothing against him, I believe she is happy, I hope she will be happy in the future. Perhaps a father always dreads marriage for his child, and yet I can conceive of circumstances in which I should not feel this heavy load, like death. I tell you what I would say to no one else, but I feel as if my affection for Theresa had made my very body sensitive to what may hurt her, and receptive of warnings. Yet she is a woman; she is twenty-five, and my feelings may be nothing but an old man's jealousy and anger at a turn of events I had not planned. Please understand--Mr. Morton is a man of breeding and education. His devotion to Theresa is evident. My objections are all of that strongest, inexplicable sort, and I feel that she has already gone from me for ever. Perhaps I have dwelt too persistently on the thought of her all these years, if one can think too much of what one loves; perhaps my perception of most things has become blunted by looking too keenly at the one thing. I do not know. It all seems very dark to me, and the burden of child-bearing is not all the mother's. I have borne Theresa for five-and-twenty years, and now she is snatched from me. Is this selfishness? I think I could have given her more willingly to another, but perhaps not, for I find my baseness is unfathomable."

The darkness which had so seldom left him now thickened and settled on Alexander, but first there was a bright spurt of light, a scattering of sparks that were the red colour of rage, and like the imprecations of his mind made visible.