It was like a word spoken in the
darkness--he held his breath to listen. He was in love with Angela
Vivian, and his love was a throbbing passion! He sat down on the stones
where he stood--it filled him with a kind of awe.
CHAPTER XXI
It filled him with a kind of awe, and the feeling was by no means
agreeable. It was not a feeling to which even a man of Bernard
Longueville's easy power of extracting the savour from a sensation could
rapidly habituate himself, and for the rest of that night it was far
from making of our hero the happy man that a lover just coming
to self-consciousness is supposed to be. It was wrong--it was
dishonorable--it was impossible--and yet it was; it was, as nothing in
his own personal experience had ever been. He seemed hitherto to have
been living by proxy, in a vision, in reflection--to have been an echo,
a shadow, a futile attempt; but this at last was life itself, this was
a fact, this was reality. For these things one lived; these were
the things that people had died for. Love had been a fable before
this--doubtless a very pretty one; and passion had been a literary
phrase--employed obviously with considerable effect. But now he stood in
a personal relation to these familiar ideas, which gave them a very much
keener import; they had laid their hand upon him in the darkness, he
felt it upon his shoulder, and he knew by its pressure that it was the
hand of destiny.
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