Читать книгу The Vision Splendid (D. K. Broster) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - D. K. Broster - Страница 26

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Tristram's plain course was to lead him, and he knew it, into the waste places of the spirit. In such a desert he wrestled, two days later, with a radiant Horatia, himself miserably conscious both of the interpretation that the world would put upon his action, and of the futility of his effort, and stabbed to the heart by her transfigured personality, to him the surest evidence of what had happened.

Yet she was the same Horatia, as kind, as generous as ever. She listened very patiently to his exposition of the difficulties attendant on a marriage with a man of a different race, of a different creed; she seemed even to do homage to the motive which had prompted him to speech. A lesser woman, so much in love as she, would, he thought, have sent him about his business.

She smiled at him divinely when he had finished.

"Dear, dear Tristram," she said, and she put her hand on his. "You are indeed, as you have always been, the best of friends. Everything you say is true, and I know you have not liked to say it. But you see that it is no good, and so I want you to be on my side in the fight I am afraid that I am going to have with dearest Papa. Will you?"

"I have already told him," said Tristram, "that if I thought the match was for your happiness, I should uphold it."

"My happiness! You cannot doubt that, can you, Tristram?"

He did not answer.

"Papa is in his study," she suggested. "Suppose you were to go now and see what you can do with him?"

"I will try," he answered.

She came after him to the door, thanking him. He could not have borne much more.