XXV

Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who

had won him having retired to her chamber. The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the

barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime

temperature into the noctambulist's face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think

of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept

apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred,

while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance

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disquieted him--palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He

could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and

what their mutual bearing should be before third parties

thenceforward. Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary

existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed

through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which

as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world

without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman-

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,

How curious you are to me!

-resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold,

the absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the

engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show;

while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty

had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up

elsewhere. Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the

yard each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house,

so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained

sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance

to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the

landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables

breathed forth "Stay!" The windows smiled, the door coaxed and

beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within

it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make

the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning

sensibility. Whose was this mighty personality?

A milkmaid's. It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the

obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held

partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides

Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their

external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The

impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life

than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life

was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.




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