For he knew that his longing was towards Maddalena.
He would like to rise up in the dawn, to take her in his arms, to carry
her off in a boat upon the sea, or to set her on a mule and lead her up
far away into the recesses of the mountains. By rocky paths he would lead
her, beyond the olives and the vines, beyond the last cottage of the
contadini, up to some eyrie from which they could look down upon the
sunlit world. He wanted to be in wildness with her, inexorably divided
from all the trammels of civilization. A desire of savagery had hold upon
him to-night. He did not go into detail. He did not think of how they
would pass their days. Everything presented itself to him broadly,
tumultuously, with a surging, onward movement of almost desperate
advance.
He wanted to teach those dark, inquiring young eyes all that they asked
to know, to set in them the light of knowledge, to make them a woman's
eyes.
And that he could never do.
His whole body was throbbing with heat, and tingling with a desire of
movement, of activity. The knowledge that all this beating energy was
doomed to uselessness, was born to do nothing, tortured him.
He tried to think steadily of Hermione, but he found the effort a
difficult one. She was remote from his body, and that physical remoteness
seemed to set her far from his spirit, too. In him, though he did not
know it, was awake to-night the fickleness of the south, of the southern
spirit that forgets so quickly what is no longer near to the southern
body. The sun makes bodily men, makes very strong the chariot of the
flesh. Sight and touch are needful, the actions of the body, to keep the
truly southern spirit true. Maurice could neither touch nor see Hermione.
In her unselfishness she had committed the error of dividing herself from
him. The natural consequences of that self-sacrifice were springing up
now like the little yellow flowers in the grasses of the lemon groves.
With all her keen intelligence she made the mistake of the enthusiast,
that of reading into those whom she loved her own shining qualities, of
seeing her own sincerities, her own faithfulness, her own strength, her
own utter loyalty looking out on her from them. She would probably have
denied that this was so, but so it was. At this very moment in Africa,
while she watched at the bedside of Artois, she was thinking of her
husband's love for her, loyalty to her, and silently blessing him for it;
she was thanking God that she had drawn such a prize in the lottery of
life. And had she been already separated from Maurice for six months she
would never have dreamed of doubting his perfect loyalty now that he had
once loved her and taken her to be his. The "all in all or not at all"
nature had been given to Hermione. She must live, rejoice, suffer, die,
according to that nature. She knew much, but she did not know how to hold
herself back, how to be cautious where she loved, how to dissect the
thing she delighted in. She would never know that, so she would never
really know her husband, as Artois might learn to know him, even had
already known him. She would never fully understand the tremendous
barriers set up between people by the different strains of blood in them,
the stern dividing lines that are drawn between the different races of
the earth. Her nature told her that love can conquer all things. She was
too enthusiastic to be always far-seeing.