VII

This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close.  The conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons, and marked at the same time the line between her husband’s negative and aggressive state.  She almost felt she had done wrong to yield; he grew so bold, concealment all discarded.  He went, that is, quite openly to the woods, forgetting all his duties, all his former occupations.  He even sought to coax her to go with him.  The hidden thing blazed out without disguise.  And, while she trembled at his energy, she admired the virile passion he displayed.  Her jealousy had long ago retired before her fear, accepting the second place.  Her one desire now was to protect.  The wife turned wholly mother.

He said so little, but—­he hated to come in.  From morning to night he wandered in the Forest; often he went out after dinner; his mind was charged with trees—­their foliage, growth, development; their wonder, beauty, strength; their loneliness in isolation, their power in a herded mass.  He knew the effect of every wind upon them; the danger from the boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern dryness, and the soft, moist tenderness that a south wind left upon their thinning boughs.  He spoke all day of their sensations:  how they drank the fading sunshine, dreamed in the moonlight, thrilled to the kiss of stars.  The dew could bring them half the passion of the night, but frost sent them plunging beneath the ground to dwell with hopes of a later coming softness in their roots.  They nursed the life they carried—­insects, larvae, chrysalis—­and when the skies above them melted, he spoke of them standing “motionless in an ecstasy of rain,” or in the noon of sunshine “self-poised upon their prodigy of shade.”

And once in the middle of the night she woke at the sound of his voice, and heard him—­wide awake, not talking in his sleep—­but talking towards the window where the shadow of the cedar fell at noon: 

  O art thou sighing for Lebanon
  In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East? 
  Sighing for Lebanon,
  Dark cedar;

and, when, half charmed, half terrified, she turned and called to him by name, he merely said—­

“My dear, I felt the loneliness—­suddenly realized it—­the alien desolation of that tree, set here upon our little lawn in England when all her Eastern brothers call her in sleep.”  And the answer seemed so queer, so “un-evangelical,” that she waited in silence till he slept again.  The poetry passed her by.  It seemed unnecessary and out of place.  It made her ache with suspicion, fear, jealousy.

The fear, however, seemed somehow all lapped up and banished soon afterwards by her unwilling admiration of the rushing splendor of her husband’s state.  Her anxiety, at any rate, shifted from the religious to the medical.  She thought he might be losing his steadiness of mind a little.  How often in her prayers she offered thanks for the guidance that had made her stay with him to help and watch is impossible to say.  It certainly was twice a day.