To keep the flame alight for ten long
buffeting years was no small achievement; better men had succumbed in
half the time. Yet something in him still held fast to the girl as with
a band of steel that _would_ not let her go entirely. Occasionally
there came strong reversions, when he ached with longing, yearning,
hope; when he loved her again; remembered passionately each detail of
the far-off courtship days in the forbidden rectory garden beyond the
small, white garden gate. Or was it merely the image and the memory he
loved "again"? He hardly knew himself. He could not tell. That "again"
puzzled him. It was the wrong word surely.... He still wrote the
promised letter, however; it was so easy; those short sentences could
not betray the dead or dying fires. One day, besides, he would return
and claim her. He meant to keep his word. And he had kept it. Here he was, this calm September afternoon, within
three miles of the village where he first had kissed her, where the
marvel of first love had come to both; three short miles between him
and the little white garden gate of which at this very moment she was
intently thinking, and behind which some fifty minutes later she would
be standing, waiting for him.... He had purposely left the train at an earlier station; he would walk
over in the dusk, climb the familiar steps, knock at the white gate
in the wall as of old, utter the promised words, "I have come back to
find you," enter, and--keep his word. He had written from Mexico a week
before he sailed; he had made careful, even accurate calculations: "In
the dusk, on the sixteenth of September, I shall come and knock," he
added to the usual sentences. The knowledge of his coming, therefore,
had been in her possession seven days. Just before sailing, moreover,
he had heard from her--though not in answer, naturally. She was well;
she was happy; she was unmarried; she was waiting. And now, as by some magical process of restoration--possible to deep
hearts only, perhaps, though even by them quite inexplicable--the state
of first love had blazed up again in him. In all its radiant beauty it
lit his heart, burned unextinguished in his soul, set body and mind
on fire. The years had merely veiled it. It burst upon him, captured,
overwhelmed him with the suddenness of a dream. He stepped from the
train. He met it in the face. It took him prisoner. The familiar trees
and hedges, the unchanged countryside, the "field-smells known in
infancy," all these, with something subtly added to them, rolled back
the passion of his youth upon him in a flood. No longer was he bound
upon what he deemed, perhaps, an act of honourable duty; it was love
that drove him, as it drove him fifteen years before. And it drove
him with the accumulated passion of desire long forcibly repressed;
almost as if, out of some fancied notion of fairness to the girl, he
had deliberately, yet still unconsciously, said "No" to it; that _she_
had not faded, but that he had decided, "_I_ must forget her." That
sentence: "Why doesn't she marry--some one else?" had not betrayed
change in himself. It surprised another motive: "It's not fair to--her!" His mind worked with a curious rapidity, but worked within one circle
only. The stress of sudden emotion was extraordinary. He remembered a
thousand things--yet, chief among them, those occasional reversions
when he had felt he "loved her again." Had he not, after all, deceived
himself? Had she ever really "faded" at all? Had he not felt he ought
to let her fade--release her that way? And the change in himself?--that
sentence on the Californian fruit-farm--what did they mean? Which had
been true, the fading or the love? The confusion in his mind was hopeless, but, as a matter of fact,
he did not think at all: he only _felt_. The momentum, besides, was
irresistible, and before the shattering onset of the sweet revival he
did not stop to analyse the strange result. He knew certain things, and
cared to know no others: that his heart was leaping, his blood running
with the heat of twenty, that joy recaptured him, that he must see,
hear, touch her, hold her in his arms--and marry her. For the fifteen
years had crumbled to a little thing, and at thirty-five he felt
himself but twenty, rapturously, deliciously in love. He went quickly, eagerly down the little street to the inn, still
feeling only, not thinking anything. The vehement uprush of the old
emotion made reflection of any kind impossible. He gave no further
thought to those long years "out there," when her name, her letters,
the very image of her in his mind, had found him, if not cold, at
least without keen response. All that was forgotten as though it had
not been. The steadfast thing in him, this strong holding to a promise
which had never wilted, ousted the recollection of fading and decay
that, whatever caused them, certainly _had_ existed. And this steadfast
thing now took command. This enduring quality in his character led
him. It was only towards the end of the hurried tea he first received
the singular impression--vague, indeed, but undeniably persistent--the
strange impression that he was _being_ led. Yet, though aware of this, he did not pause to argue or reflect. The emotional displacement in him, of course, had been more than
considerable: there had been upheaval, a change whose abruptness was
even dislocating, fundamental in a sense he could not estimate--shock. Yet he took no count of anything but the one mastering desire to get to
her as soon as possible, knock at the small, white garden gate, hear
her answering voice, see the low wooden door swing open--take her. There was joy and glory in his heart, and a yearning sweet delight. At
this very moment she was expecting him. And he--had come. Behind these positive emotions, however, there lay concealed all
the time others that were of a negative character. Consciously, he
was not aware of them, but they were there; they revealed their
presence in various little ways that puzzled him. He recognised them
absentmindedly, as it were; did not analyse or investigate them. For, through the confusion upon his faculties, rose also a certain
hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or
miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch
of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in
that tinge of sadness which accompanies the twilight of an autumn day,
when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past. Some trick of memory connected it with a scene of early boyhood, when,
meaning to see the sunrise, he overslept, and, by a brief half-hour,
was just--too late. He noted it merely, then passed on; he did not
understand it; he hurried all the more, this hurry the only sign that
it _was_ noted. "I must be quick," flashed up across his strongly
positive emotions. And, due to this hurry, possibly, were the slight miscalculations
that he made. They were very trivial.