When panting sighs the bosom fill,
And hands by chance united thrill
At once with one delicious pain
The pulses and the nerves of twain;
When eyes that erst could meet with ease,
Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun
Ecstatic conscious unison, -
The sure beginnings, say, be these,
Prelusive to the strain of love
Which angels sing in heaven above?
Or is it but the vulgar tune,
Which all that breathe beneath the moon
So accurately learn - so soon?
And now she was sleeping.
That was the disgraceful sight that met Charles's eyes as he finally steeled himself to look over the partition. She lay curled up like a small girl under her old coat, her feet drawn up from the night's cold, her head turned from him and resting on a dark-green Paisley scarf; as if to preserve her one great jewel, her loosened hair, from the hayseed beneath. In that stillness her light, even breathing was both visible and audible; and for a moment that she should be sleeping there so peacefully seemed as wicked a crime as any Charles had expected.
Yet there rose in him, and inextinguishably, a desire to protect. So sharply it came upon him, he tore his eyes away and turned, shocked at this proof of the doctor's accusation, for he knew his instinct was to kneel beside her and comfort her ... worse, since the dark privacy of the barn, the girl's posture, suggested irresistibly a bedroom. He felt his heart beating as if he had run a mile. The tiger was in him, not in her. A moment passed and then he retraced his steps silently but quickly to the door. He looked back, he was about to go; and then he heard his own voice say her name. He had not intended it to speak. Yet it spoke.
`Miss Woodruff.'
No answer.
He said her name again, a little louder, more himself, now that the dark depths had surged safely past.
There was a tiny movement, a faint rustle; and then her head appeared, almost comically, as she knelt hastily up and peeped over the partition. He had a vague impression, through the motes, of shock and dismay.
`Oh forgive me, forgive me ...'
The head bobbed down out of sight. He withdrew into the sunlight outside. Two herring gulls flew over, screaming raucously. Charles moved put of sight of the fields nearer the Dairy. Grogan, he did not fear; or expect yet. But the place was too open; the dairyman might come for hay ... though why he should when his fields were green with spring grass Charles was too nervous to consider.
`Mr. Smithson?'
He moved round back to the door, just in time to prevent her from calling, this time more anxiously, his name again. They stood some ten feet apart, Sarah in the door, Charles by the corner of the building. She had performed a hurried toilet, put on her coat, and held her scarf in her hand as if she had used it for a brush. Her eyes were troubled, but her features were still softened by sleep, though flushed at the rude awakening.
There was a wildness about her. Not the wildness of lunacy or hysteria - but that same wildness Charles had sensed in the wren's singing ... a wildness of innocence, almost an eagerness. And just as the sharp declension of that dawn walk had so confounded - and compounded - his earnest autobiographical gloom, so did that intensely immediate face confound and compound all the clinical horrors bred in Charles's mind by the worthy doctors Matthaei and Grogan. In spite of Hegel, the Victorians were not a dialectically minded age; they did not think naturally in opposites, of positives and negatives as aspects of the same whole. Paradoxes troubled rather than pleased them. They were not the people for existentialist moments, but for chains of cause and effect; for positive all-explaining theories, carefully studied and studiously applied. They were busy erecting, of course; and we have been busy demolishing for so long that now erection seems as ephemeral an activity as bubble-blowing. So Charles was inexplicable to himself. He managed a very unconvincing smile.
`May we not be observed here?' She followed his glance towards the hidden Dairy. `It is Axminster market. As soon as he has milked he will be gone.'
But she moved back inside the barn. He followed her in, and they stood, still well apart, Sarah with her back to him.
`You have passed the night here?'
She nodded. There was a silence.
`Are you not hungry?'
Sarah shook her head; and silence flowed back again. But this time she broke it herself.
`You know?'
`I was away all yesterday. I could not come.'
More silence. `Mrs. Poulteney has recovered?'
`I understand so.'
`She was most angry with me.'
`It is no doubt for the best. You were ill placed in her house.'
`Where am I not ill placed?'
He remembered he must choose his words with care.
`Now come ... you must not feel sorry for yourself.' He moved a step or two closer. `There has been great concern. A search party was out looking for you last night. In the storm.'
Her face turned as if he might have been deceiving her. She saw that he was not; and he in his turn saw by her surprise that she was not deceiving him when she said, `I did not mean to cause such trouble.'
`Well ... never mind. I daresay they enjoyed the excitement. But it is clear that you must now leave Lyme.'
She bowed her head. His voice had been too stern. He hesitated, then stepped forward and laid his hand on her shoulder comfortingly.
`Do not fear. I come to help you do that.'
He had thought by his brief gesture and assurance to take the first step towards putting out the fire the doctor had told him he had lit; but when one is oneself the fuel, firefighting is a hopeless task. Sarah was all flame. Her eyes were all flame as she threw a passionate look back at Charles. He withdrew his hand, but she caught it and before he could stop her raised it towards her lips. He snatched it away in alarm then; and she reacted as if he had struck her across the face.
`My dear Miss Woodruff, pray control yourself. I -'
`I cannot.'
The words were barely audible, but they silenced Charles. He tried to tell himself that she meant she could not control her gratitude for his charity ... he tried, he tried. But there came on him a fleeting memory of Catullus: `Whenever I see you, sound fails, my tongue falters, thin fire steals through my limbs, an inner roar, and darkness shrouds my ears and eyes.' Catullus was translating Sappho here; and the Sapphic remains the best clinical description of love in European medicine.
Sarah and Charles stood there, prey - if they had but known it - to precisely the same symptoms; admitted on the one hand, denied on the other; though the one who denied found himself unable to move away. Four or five seconds of intense repressed emotion passed. Then Sarah could quite literally stand no more. She fell to her knees at his feet. The words rushed out.
`I have told you a lie, I made sure Mrs. Fairley saw me, I knew she would tell Mrs. Poulteney.'
What control Charles had felt himself gaining now slipped from his grasp again. He stared down aghast at the upraised face before him. He was evidently being asked for forgiveness; but he himself was asking for guidance, since the doctors had failed him again. The distinguished young ladies who had gone in for house-burning and anonymous letter-writing had all, with a nice deference to black-and-white moral judgments, waited to be caught before confession.
Tears had sprung in her eyes, A fortune coming to him, a golden world; and against that, a minor exudation of the lachrymatory glands, a trembling drop or two of water, so small, so transitory, so brief. Yet he stood like a man beneath a breaking dam, instead of a man above a weeping woman.
`But why ... ?'
She looked up then, with an intense earnestness and supplication; with a declaration so unmistakable that words were needless; with a nakedness that made any evasion - any other `My dear Miss Woodruff!' - impossible.
He slowly reached out his hands and raised her. Their eyes remained on each other's, as if they were both hypnotized. She seemed to him - or those wide, those drowning eyes seemed - the most ravishingly beautiful he had ever seen. What lay behind them did not matter. The moment overcame the age.
He took her into his arms, saw her eyes close as she swayed into his embrace; then closed his own and found her lips. He felt not only their softness but the whole close substance of her body; her sudden smallness, fragility, weakness, tenderness ...
He pushed her violently away.