"I, Waldo, I?" she said. "I will do nothing good for myself, nothing for the world, till some one wakes me. I am asleep, swathed, shut up in self; till I have been delivered I will deliver no one."
He looked at her wondering, but she was not looking at him.
"To see the good and the beautiful," she said, "and to have no strength to live it, is only to be Moses on the mountain of Nebo, with the land at your feet and no power to enter. It would be better not to see it. Come," she said, looking up into his face, and seeing its uncomprehending expression, "let us go, it is getting late. Doss is anxious for his breakfast also," she added, wheeling round and calling to the dog, who was endeavouring to unearth a mole, an occupation to which he had been zealously addicted from the third month, but in which he had never on any single occasion proved successful.
Waldo shouldered his bag, and Lyndall walked on before in silence, with the dog close to her side. Perhaps she thought of the narrowness of the limits within which a human soul may speak and be understood by its nearest of mental kin, of how soon it reaches that solitary land of the individual experience, in which no fellow footfall is ever heard. Whatever her thoughts may have been, she was soon interrupted. Waldo came close to her, and standing still, produced with awkwardness from his breast-pocket a small carved box.
"I made it for you," he said, holding it out.
"I like it," she said, examining it carefully.
The workmanship was better than that of the grave-post. The flowers that covered it were delicate, and here and there small conical protuberances were let in among them. She turned it round critically. Waldo bent over it lovingly.
"There is one strange thing about it," he said earnestly, putting a finger on one little pyramid. "I made it without these, and I felt something was wrong; I tried many changes, and at last I let these in, and then it was right. But why was it? They are not beautiful in themselves."
"They relieve the monotony of the smooth leaves, I suppose."
He shook his head as over a weighty matter.
"The sky is monotonous," he said, "when it is blue, and yet it is beautiful. I have thought of that often; but it is not monotony, and it is not variety makes beauty. What is it? The sky, and your face, and this box--the same thing is in them all, only more in the sky and in your face.
But what is it?"
She smiled.
"So you are at your old work still. Why, why, why? What is the reason?
It is enough for me," she said, "if I find out what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is real and what is not. Why it is there, and over the final cause of things in general, I don't trouble myself; there must be one, but what is it to me? If I howl to all eternity I shall never get hold of it; and if I did I might be no better off. But you Germans are born with an aptitude for borrowing; you can't help yourselves. You must sniff after reasons, just as that dog must after a mole. He knows perfectly well he will never catch it, but he's under the imperative necessity of digging for it."
"But he might find it."
"Might!--but he never has and never will. Life is too short to run after mights; we must have certainties."
She tucked the box under her arm and was about to walk on, when Gregory Rose, with shining spurs, an ostrich feather in his hat, and a silver- headed whip, careered past. He bowed gallantly as he went by. They waited till the dust of the horse's hoofs had laid itself.
"There," said Lyndall, "goes a true woman--one born for the sphere that some women have to fill without being born for it. How happy he would be sewing frills into his little girl's frocks, and how pretty he would look sitting in a parlour, with a rough man making love to him! Don't you think so?"
"I shall not stay here when he is master," Waldo answered, not able to connect any kind of beauty with Gregory Rose.
"I should imagine not. The rule of a woman is tyranny; but the rule of a man-woman grinds fine. Where are you going?"
"Anywhere."
"What to do?"
"See--see everything."
