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CHAPTER 42.
THE little ones were early taken by the dame to bed, and Margaret, who remained throughout the evening in a sort of coma, would have followed their example, had not Noel induced her to take some turns with him in the congenial gloom of the cool cloisters. By the way in which she leant upon his arm he perceived that she was not quite herself, and felt inclined to reproach himself for the fatigue to which he had subjected her.
After walking for a short time, he had a sofa placed in the corridor overlooking the bay, and there, from their lofty casement, they sat together long after the whole household had retired for the night, rarely speaking, but indulging in the deep mutual reverie which is the most eloquent language of lovers such as they.
To both it seemed as if the supreme trial of their lives, the hour of bereavement and of widowhood, was at hand with the morrow’s sun. Occasionally Margaret’s mind seemed to wander from the present into a region whither Noel failed to follow her, for she murmured strange and broken words. Once he caught a sentence which he recognised as an echo of Theckla, in ‘Wallenstein,’ and which suggested a struggle going on in her mind: ‘Has he not a right to his own creature?’ And once, ‘Surely such love has its rights, as well as its duties.’ And then she seemed to doze, after which she was refreshed, and ready to talk with him.
‘I suppose one could live up to it, so as to lose the agony of the pleasure? I am so glad you did not tell me beforehand.’
‘I know too well,’ he replied, ‘that anticipation is the grave of delight. To-day’s experience can never be repeated. Mental emotions, once felt, pass for ever. To-morrow evening, or the next, we might sit here in the same way, but there could be no return of the ecstasy. Whether happily or not, memory is too strong for such feelings to recur in their first vividness and freshness.’
Then they proceeded to talk of the meeting of the morrow, and of Edmund’s intentions after he had seen his uncle, and deposited Margaret with her relations.
‘I dare not stay long with you and Sophia together,’ he said. ‘As soon as my uncle releases me, I shall take a studio
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either in
‘You never spoke ironically to me before,’ she observed.
‘Nothing was farther from my thought,’ he returned, a little surprised at her ready appropriation of the phrase.
‘No, no, I was foolish; and I think it must be that the strain of this too delicious time has been too much for me, and, added to the prospect of its termination, has made me sensitive and irritable. I am not accustomed to happiness, you know. No, I am convinced that, to the very depth of your heart, you have all regard for me, all belief in me. But are you so sure that you will always recognise whatever I have done as the highest?’
‘Oh, Margaret, my sole angel, you know that you hold all the trust and faith of my whole nature, and that I shall never read you except as you would wish to be read. To cease to believe in you would be, for me, the advent of madness; the final catastrophe in my soul of God and the universe.’
She silently pressed his hand for a few moments, and then rose to retire. Edmund rose at the same moment, and she suffered him to clasp her fervently, as a last adieu before their separation.
Noel remained in the corridor some time longer. In addition to the sadness engendered by the pear termination of this the sweetest period of his existence, he was somewhat alarmed at the effect which the long-continued tension of feeling had produced upon Margaret; and he comprehended the danger which even the purest affection and the strongest resolution might run in the presence of so long and intense a strain; – danger to the physical powers also, of which she seemed to him to exhibit the effect.
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