and heart-beat whereon his riding thoughts seemed to mount into the starred sublimities of the unceilinged night: 'Nothing upon conditions. Condition of wedlock, kingdom, and be answerable: No. Betrayal so of his commission: No, by my soul! Throwing over of freedom: lean on this, 'stead of ride him as I have ridden aforetime: ha! No. Or, glutton-like: smircher of—' He checked; overtaken, as a man smitten on the nape of the neck with a stick, with a blindness of thought and sense. Then he quickened his pace for a dozen steps, then swung round and, rigid as a statue, stood facing Aphrodite's statue there: of Aphrodite, white between stars and paler stars reflected in the water, and water-lilies that floated asleep about Her feet. And he thought with himself, as thought stood up again: 'You are other. Even He that made You—' the night-wind moved for a moment in that sleeping garden, and in a moment was fallen again to sleep: 'Your power forced Him, making of You, make the one thing desirable.'
A breath from the" lilies fainted from under Lessing-ham's nostrils. His mind stopped and stood still. So a man cloudbound upon the backbone of some high mountain stands clean lost, for the opening and shutting again of a window in the mists that has revealed, far below, a glimpse not of familiar country but of strange and un-remembered: and yet embraced, upon some unseized persuasive contrariety of argument addressed to blind certitudes secure and asleep within him, for a country familiar and his own. And now, with a like alien outwardness that the inward touch denied, words which, for all their curiosity of outmoded idiom, he seemed to know for his own words drifted across his thought:
And we, madonna, are we not exiles still?
When first we met
Some shadowy door swung wide,
Some faint voice cried,
—Not heeded then
For clack of drawing-room chit-chat, fiddles, glittering lights,
Waltzes, dim stairs, scents, smiles of other women—yet,
'Twas so: that night of nights,
Behind the hill
Some light that does not set
Had stirr'd, bringing again
New earth, new morning-tide.
As a man awakening would turn back into his dream, yet with that very striving awakes; or as eyes search for a star, picked up out but now, but vanished again in the suffusing of the sky with light of approaching day; so Lessingham seized at, yet in the twinkling lost, the occasion of those lines, the thin seeming memory blown with them as if from some former forgotten life. Out of which passivity of dream, waiting on flight where no air is to bear up wings; waiting on some face but there is no seeing where all .is darkness; some voice or hand-touch where all is deaf and bodiless; out of this his senses began to look abroad again only when he was come back at last now to his own chamber, and stood, where an hour ago he had stood, looking into his own eyes. And now, as the lineaments of earth are bodied to a gradual clearness under the grey of dawn, he began to see again his own face, as mountain should so at dawn look across to mountain through heights of air.
‘I will have—,' he said and was silent. 'But upon no bargains,' he said. 'Conditions is blasphemy.'
Shred by shred he tore up now his leaf of sferra cavallo, sprinkling it shred by shred upon the whitening embers in the fire-place; and so, with a half mocking half regretful look, stood watching till the last shred shrivelled, and burnt up, and disappeared.