’You perceive, monsieur, that I have my sentimental fits like others; but in truth I am not insensible to the picturesque or to gratitude, and I thank you sincerely for coming, considering that I wrote like a Sphinx—­ to evade writing comme une folle!’

She swept to the bell.

Standing in the arch of the entrance, she stretched her whip out to a black mass of prostrate timber, saying: 

‘It fell in the storm at two o’clock after midnight, and you on the sea!’

CHAPTER XXIV

HIS HOLIDAY

A single day was to be the term of his holiday at Tourdestelle; but it stood forth as one of those perfect days which are rounded by an evening before and a morning after, giving him two nights under the same roof with Renee, something of a resemblance to three days of her; anticipation and wonder filling the first, she the next, the adieu the last:  every hour filled.  And the first day was not over yet.  He forced himself to calmness, that he might not fritter it, and walked up and down the room he was dressing in, examining its foreign decorations, and peering through the window, to quiet his nerves.  He was in her own France with her!  The country borrowed hues from Renee, and lent some.  This chivalrous France framed and interlaced her image, aided in idealizing her, and was in turn transfigured.  Not half so well would his native land have pleaded for the forgiveness of a British damsel who had wrecked a young man’s immoderate first love.  That glorified self-love requires the touch upon imagination of strangeness and an unaccustomed grace, to subdue it and make it pardon an outrage to its temples and altars, and its happy reading of the heavens, the earth too:  earth foremost, we ought perhaps to say.  It is an exacting heathen, best understood by a glance at what will appease it:  beautiful, however, as everybody has proved; and shall it be decried in a world where beauty is not overcommon, though it would slaughter us for its angry satisfaction, yet can be soothed by a tone of colour, as it were by a novel inscription on a sweetmeat?

The peculiarity of Beauchamp was that he knew the slenderness of the thread which was leading him, and foresaw it twisting to a coil unless he should hold firm.  His work in life was much above the love of a woman in his estimation, so he was not deluded by passion when he entered the chateau; it is doubtful whether he would not hesitatingly have sacrificed one of the precious votes in Bevisham for the pleasure of kissing her hand when they were on the steps.  She was his first love and only love, married, and long ago forgiven:—­married; that is to say, she especially among women was interdicted to him by the lingering shadow of the reverential love gone by; and if the anguish of the lover’s worse than death survived in a shudder of memory at the thought of her not solely lost to him but possessed by another,