While his hands worked, as you have seen them; while his lips uttered hard words, or while his mind added figure to figure at his washstand-desk, Felise filled his entire inner existence. He lived in a dream, this dreamless man; he was absorbed in one idea—an idea so fixed that his mind was vacant. His hands moved with no consciousness behind them, as the wheels of a machine go round.
Work over, he slept at once without any interval of love-like reverie; for he carried Felise instantly with him into his slumber, so fixed was her image in his mind. His abstraction was complete. The form of Robert Godwin walked among the fields, and rode along the roads; the lips of Robert Godwin gave forth articulate sound; the signature of Robert Godwin was traced upon the cheque—but Robert Godwin, the personality, was not there. His mind was with Felise.
It is said that women above all things like to be loved. Very rarely is a woman loved as Godwin loved, such utter abstraction, such loss of self-existence, such death of self-existence. The woman that he loved should have been happy. But in Paris they say, that woman is indeed happy to be loved, but only when the lover can minister to her vanity.
Robert Godwin had no knowledge whatever of such studies of woman’s heart, some base and worthless, some true; yet his clearness of intellect (consequent upon the shortness of his view, not its breadth; he held everything, as it were, close to his mind, as people with dim sight hold all things close to their eyes)—his clearness of intellect instinctively told him that Felise was not for him; he could never be anything to her.
The Parisian would put it in this way: He comprehended that there was nothing about him that could flatter or excite her vanity.
He loved her and gave her up at the same time. He loved her more and more as the years drew on, and year by year he acknowledged to himself that the gulf between them grew more and more impassable.
At that moment in the meadow he was already forty; she was ten or eleven. Yet it was not the difference of age; it was the total, worldwide difference of personality.
Now he was forty-nine, Felise nineteen—nearly twenty. Nine great wedges had been driven in by Time to split their lives asunder.
Upright, strong, without one grey fleck in his dark hair, Godwin had not altered an atom in those nine years. He was as vigorous, as full of manhood as at twenty-one. But still he was forty-nine; he was on the verge of fifty.
Can you imagine a woman in solitude weighing these words on her lips, “He is on the verge of fifty”?
Yet it was not the years; it was the total, the worldwide difference of personality. Godwin, all these nine years, had held the matter up close to his mind, and every day the certainty grew more certain, the fact more palpable, that she was not for him. By no possible manner of means could Felise ever come to care for Robert Godwin.
In all that time scarcely a day went by that he did not see her. The two houses were hardly half a mile apart; the girl was in the fields constantly, and he was always riding or walking across them. He never purposely approached her, but his path frequently brought him near; sometimes they met. Her existence was always before his eyes.
XXII
She thought of nothing but the sun and wind, the flowers and the running stream. She listened to the wind in the trees and began herself to sing. The child was led along by unknown impulses, as if voices issued from the woods calling her to enter. It would have been impossible for her to tell why she was so happy in the freedom of the fields.
Not once now and then, or one day only, when the smiling hours of early June lit the meadows, but every day, the year round, Felise went forth with the same joy.
She trod the paths to their utmost ending, through meads and wheatfields, round the skirt of copses where pheasants feeding hurried in at her coming, or wood-pigeons rose with a clatter from the firs. Climbing the rugged stiles, treading the bending plank stretched across the streamlet, stepping from stone to stone in the watery ways where woods and marshes met, up the steep hill where the shepherds had cut steps in the turf, she traced the path to its ending. Through the long lanes, hazel-boughs on one side, hawthorn on the other; along the rude wagon-tracks winding in and out the corn; by shadowy green arcades of the covers; by deep valleys, sunless because of the massy beeches high on the slopes.
There was not a spot made beautiful by trees and hedges, by grass and flowers, and sun and shade, that she had not visited and lingered in. She knew when each would look at its loveliest—the corner of maple-bushes when the first frosts had yellowed the spray and strewn the sward with colour of leaves; the row of oaks when the acorns were ripe, and the rooks above and the pheasants beneath were feasting; the meadow where the purple orchis grew in the first days of May; the osier-beds where the marsh marigolds flowered, and again in the time of the yellow iris.
She knew where the hill, lifting itself in a bold brow thrown forward from the range, gave a view over the wooded plain almost to the horizon; where the downs opening in a pass, the broad green sea gleamed out to the clouds.
The place where the stream ran at the foot of a cliff, overshadowed by the trees on the summit; where it came again to sweet meads,
