He had desired her to look at him, but it was he who
had turned away. He sat with his head between
his hands, his elbows on his knees.
She repeated, with rather a plaintive note, as though
in his pose she saw some pain she had caused him,
“You see, I had known you all my life, Marko—”
He said, still looking upon the ground between his
feet, “But you haven’t explained anything.
You’ve only told me. You haven’t explained
why.”
She said with astounding simplicity, “Well,
you see, Marko, I made a mistake. I made a most
frightful mistake. I chose. I chose wrong.
I ought to have married you, Marko.”
And his words were a groan. “Nona—Nona—”
He was presently walking back, returning to Tidborough.
He was trying very hard, all his life’s training
against sudden unbridling of his bridled passions,
to grapple his mind back from its wild and passionate
desires and from its amazed coursings upon the immense
prairies, teeming with hazards, fears, enchantments,
hopes, dismays, that broke before this hour as breaks
upon the hunter’s gaze, amazingly awarded from
the hill, savannas boundless, new, unpathed,—from
these to grapple back his mind to its schooled thought
and ordered habit, to its well-trodden ways of duty,
obligation, rectitude. He had not left them.
But for that cry of her name wrung from him by sudden
application of pain against whose shock he was not
steeled, he had answered nothing to her lamentable
disclosure. This which he now knew, these violent
passions which now he felt, but lit for him more whitely
the road his feet must take. If he had ever tried
consciously to see his life and Mabel’s from
Mabel’s point of view, now, when his mind threatened
disloyalty to her, he must try. And would!
The old habit, the old trick of seeing the other side,
acted never so strongly upon him as when unkindness
appeared to lie in his own attitude. Unkindness
was unfairness and unfairness was above all qualities
the quality he could not tolerate. And here was
unfairness, open, monstrous, dishonourable.
Mabel should not feel it.
But he was aware, he was informed as by a voice in
his ears, “You have struck your tents.
You are upon the march.”
He approached the town. The school lay in this
quarter and his way ran through its playing fields
and its buildings. Nature in her moods much fashioned
his thoughts when he walked the countryside or rode
his daily journey on his bicycle. He now carried
his thoughts into her mood that stood about him.
