It was easy to see, here in the quietness of the chapel, how much more
of youth there was in the man than in the impression he gave to
others. He was little over thirty and the lines on his face were not
lines of care, but the marks traced by exposure and hard exercise. His
eyes were the narrowed eyes of men who look over long distances in
rigorous weathers, and if his thin beard hid jaw and chin, the outline
of his chest and shoulders was sharp and young. Now and again he would
look up, throwing back his head as he sent a note from his expanded
lungs into the swell of the hymn. The words that floated out round her
had neither interest nor meaning for Susannah; for her there was only
a single person, a single voice, under that roof. They had reached the
last lines:
"Ye men of God, lift up your souls,
Nor halt with failing breath;
Yet one more stream before us rolls,
The dark blue flood of death.
Across its waves our pathway lies,
The hosts go on before;
And Zion's city meets our eyes
Set on the other shore."
As the singing ceased, Heber shut his book and looked round like one
awakened, straight at Susannah. The act was so spontaneous that
neither he nor the woman, whose gaze was fixed on him, had time to
return from the widely separated regions in which their respective
souls roamed.
In that instant there was revealed to the shepherd the thing that he
had never suspected. Perhaps the feelings roused by the strenuous,
half-militant spirit of the hymn and the beat of its swinging music
had lighted the whole range of his imagination; perhaps the shock of
the contrast between that seen by his inner and his outer vision
quickened it; in any case, the passion in Susannah's face shot its
message across the chapel and he stood stock still while the rest of
the congregation sat down. Then he thought of his cousin and Catherine
as he had seen them that night in the kitchen at Talgwynne, and the
blood ran hot to his tanned face.
Black Heber was not vain; he had no time for vanity, had it been in
him; nevertheless, Susannah's look pierced to his inactive, remote
self-consciousness. He resumed his seat, feeling as if a rough hand
had taken him by the collar. When a man without vanity loves a woman
as much as he loved Catherine Dennis, the unasked favour of another is
only a gyve to be shaken off. Unreturned love must be worn either as a
fetter or as a decoration; and though there are many men whose pride
it is to go through life decked out in the cheap jewellery of the
affections, the shepherd was not one of them. Had he found time to
think of such things they would have irritated him. He did not care
for ornaments; he only cared for freedom and for getting what he
wanted. Though he believed himself to have lost Catherine for good and
all, his freedom remained; and he felt now as though Susannah menaced
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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