Before such a question, as before several others when they recurred, he would come to a pause, leaning his arms on the old parapet and losing himself in a far excursion. He had as to so many of the matters in hand a divided view, and this was exactly what made him reach out. in his unrest, for some idea, lurking (206) in the vast freshness of the night, at the breath of which disparities would submit to fusion and so spreading beneath him, make him feel he floated. What he kept finding himself return to, disturbingly enough, was the reflexion, deeper than anything else, that in forming a new and intimate tie he should in a manner abandon, or at the best signally relegate, his daughter. He should reduce to definite form the idea that he had lost her--as was indeed inevitable--by her own marriage; he should reduce to definite form the idea of his having incurred an injury, or at the best an inconvenience, that required some makeweight and deserved some amends. And he should do this the more, which was the great point, that he should appear to adopt in doing it the sentiment, in fact the very conviction, entertained and quite sufficiently expressed by Maggie herself in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had suffered--putting it with extravagance--at her hands. If she put it with extravagance the extravagance was yet sincere, for it came--which she put with extravagance too--from her persistence always in thinking, feeling, talking about him as young. He had had glimpses of moments when to hear her thus, in her absolutely unforced compunction, one would have supposed the special edge of the wrong she had done him to consist in his having still before him years and years to groan under it. She had sacrificed a parent, the pearl of parents, no older than herself: it would n't so much have mattered if he had been of common parental age. That he was n't, that he was just her extraordinary equal and contemporary, this was what added to her act the long train of its (207) effect. Light broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence of the fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which opened out so wide, for the minute, that he held his breath with wonder. He was afterwards to recall how just then the autumn night seemed to clear to a view in which the whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace where he stood, the others, with their steps, below, the gardens, the park, the lake, the circling woods, lay there as under some strange midnight sun. It all met him during these instants as a vast expanse of DISCOVERY, a world that looked, so lighted, extraordinarily new, and in which familiar objects had taken on a distinctness that, as if it had been a loud, a spoken pretension to beauty, interest, importance, to he scarce knew what, gave them an inordinate quantity of character and verily an inordinate size. The hallucination, or whatever he might have called it, was brief, but it lasted long enough to leave him gasping. The gasp of admiration had by this time however lost itself in an intensity that quickly followed--the way the wonder of it, since wonder was in question, truly had been the strange DELAY of his vision. He had these several days groped and groped for an object that lay at his feet and as to which his blindness came from his stupidly looking beyond. It had sat all the while at his hearthstone, whence it now gazed up in his face.
Once he had recognised it there everything became coherent. The sharp point to which all his light converged was that the whole call of his future to him as a father would be in his so managing that Maggie (208) would less and less appear to herself to have forsaken him. And it not only would n't be decently humane, decently possible, not to make this relief easy to her--the idea shone upon him, more than that, as exciting, inspiring, uplifting. It fell in so beautifully with what might be otherwise possible; it stood there absolutely confronted with the material way in which it might be met. The way in which it might be met was by his putting his child at peace, and the way to put her at peace was to provide for his future--that is for hers--by marriage, by a marriage as good, speaking proportionately, as hers had been. As he fairly inhaled this measure of refreshment he tasted the meaning of recent agitations. He had seen that Charlotte could contribute--what he had n't seen was what she could contribute TO. When it had all supremely cleared up and he had simply settled this service to his daughter well before him as the proper direction of his young friend's leisure, the cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was constituted.
It was n't only moreover that the word, with a click, so fitted the riddle, but that the riddle, in such perfection, fitted the word. He might have been equally in want and yet not have had his remedy. Oh if Charlotte did n't accept him the remedy of course would fail; but, as everything had fallen together, it was at least there to be tried. And success would be great--that was his last throb--if the measure of relief effected for Maggie should at all prove to have been given by his own actual sense of felicity.
He really did n't know when in his life he had thought of anything happier.
To think of it merely for himself would have (209) been, even as he had just lately felt, even doing all justice to that condition--yes, impossible.
But there was a grand difference in thinking of it for his child.