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ONCE MORE A SECRET.
One day in June I had gone into the garden about one o'clock, whether
with or without object I forget. I had just seen my uncle start for
Wittenage. Hearing a horse's hoofs in the lane that ran along the outside
of the wall, I looked up. The same moment the horse stopped, and the face
of his rider appeared over the wall, between two stems of yew, and two
great flowers of purple lilac, in shape like two perfect bunches of
swarming bees. It was the face of a youth of eighteen, and beautiful with
a right manly beauty.
The moment I looked on this face, I fell into a sort of trance--that is,
I entered for a moment some condition of existence beyond the ramparts of
what commonly we call life. Love at first sight it was that initiated the
strange experience. But understand me: real as what immediately followed
was to the consciousness, there was no actual fact in it.
I stood gazing. My eyes seemed drawn, and drawing my person toward the
vision. Isolate over the garden-wall was the face; the rest of the man
and all the horse were hidden behind it. Betwixt the yew stems and the
two great lilac flowers--how heart and brain are yet filled with the old
scent of them!--my face, my mouth, my lips met his. I grew blind as with
all my heart I kissed him. Then came a flash of icy terror, and a shudder
which it frights me even now to recall. Instantly I knew that but a
moment had passed, and that I had not moved an inch from the spot where
first my eyes met his.
But my eyes yet rested on his; I could not draw them away. I could not
free myself. Helplessness was growing agony. His voice broke the spell.
He lifted his hunting-cap, and begged me to tell him the way to the next
village. My self-possession returned, and the joy of its restoration
drove from me any lingering embarrassment. I went forward, and without a
faltering tone, I believe, gave him detailed directions. He told me
afterwards that, himself in a state of bewildered surprise, he thought me
the coolest young person he had ever had the fortune to meet. Why should
one be pleased to know that she looked quite different from what she
felt? There is something wrong there, surely! I acknowledge the something
wrong, but do not understand it. He lifted his cap again, and rode away.
I stood still at the foot of the lilac-tree, and, from a vapour,
condensed, not to a stone, but to a world, in which a new Flora was about
to be developed. If no new spiritual sense was awakened in me, at least I
was aware of a new consciousness. I had never been to myself what I was
now.
Terror again seized me: the face might once more look over the wall, and
find me where it had left me! I turned, and went slowly away from the
house, gravitating to the darkest part of the garden.
"What has come to me," I said, "that I seek the darkness? Is this another
secret? Am I in the grasp of a new enemy?"
And with that came the whirlwind of perplexity. Must I go the first
moment I knew I could find him, and tell my uncle what had happened, and
how I felt? or must I have, and hold, and cherish in silent heart, a
thing so wondrous, so precious, so absorbing? Had I not deliberately
promised--of my own will and at my own instance--never again to have a
secret from him? Was this a secret? Was it not a secret?
The storm was up, and went on. The wonder is that, in the fire of the
new torment, I did not come to loathe the very thought of the young
man--which would have delivered me, if not from the necessity of
confession, yet from the main difficulty in confessing.
I said to myself that the old secret was of a wrong done to my uncle;
that what had made me miserable then was a bad secret. The perception of
this difference gave me comfort for a time, but not for long. The fact
remained, that I knew something concerning myself which my best friend
did not know. It was, and I could not prevent it from being, a barrier
between us!
Yet what was it I was concealing from him? What had I to tell him? How
was I to represent a thing of which I knew neither the name nor the
nature, a thing I could not describe? Could I confess what I did not
understand? The thing might be what, in the tales I had read, was called
love, but I did not know that it was. It might be something new, peculiar
to myself; something for which there was no word in the language! How was
I to tell? I saw plainly that, if I tried to convey my new experience, I
should not get beyond the statement that I had a new experience. It did
not occur to me that the thing might be so well known, that a mere hint
of the feelings concerned, would enable any older person to classify the
consciousness. I said to myself I should merely perplex my uncle. And in
truth I believe that love, in every mind in which it arises, will vary in
colour and form--will always partake of that mind's individual isolation
in difference. This, however, is nothing to the present point.
Comfort myself as I might, that the impossible was required of no one,
and granted that the thing was impossible, it was none the less a cause
of misery, a present disaster: I was aware, and soon my uncle would be
aware, of an impenetrable something separating us. I felt that we had
already begun to grow strange to each other, and the feeling lay like
death at my heart.
Our lessons together were still going on; that I was no longer a child
had made only the difference that progress must make; and I had no
thought that they would not thus go on always. They were never for a
moment irksome to me; I might be tired by them, but never of them. We
were regularly at work together by seven, and after half an hour for
breakfast, resumed work; at half-past eleven our lessons were over. But
although the day was then clear of the imperative, much the greater part
of it was in general passed in each other's company. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together in the study. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together on horseback.
For this day, then, our lessons were over, and my uncle was from home.
This was an indisputable relief, yet the fact that it was so, pained me
keenly, for I recognized in it the first of the schism. How I got through
the day, I cannot tell. I was in a dream, not all a dream of delight.
Haunted with the face I had seen, and living in the new consciousness it
had waked in me, I spent most of it in the garden, now in the glooms of
the yew-walks, and now in the smiling wilderness. It was odd, however,
that, although I was not expected to be in my uncle's room at any time
but that of lessons, all the morning I had a feeling as if I ought to be
there, while yet glad that my uncle was not there.
It was late before he returned, and I went to bed. Perhaps I retired so
soon that I might not have to look into his eyes. Usually, I sat now
until he came home. I was long in getting to sleep, and then I dreamed. I
thought I was out in the storm, and the flash came which revealed the
horse and his rider, but they were both different. The horse in the dream
was black as coal, as if carved out of the night itself; and the man
upon him was the beautiful stranger whose horse I had not seen for the
garden-wall. The darkness fell, and the voice of my uncle called to me. I
waited for him in the storm with a troubled heart, for I knew he had not
seen that vision, and I could no more tell him of it, than could
Christabel tell her father what she had seen after she lay down. I woke,
but my waking was no relief.
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