Fate & Circumstance - A North & South Continuation

CHAPTER SEVEN - LOOKING NORTH

CHAPTER SEVEN – LOOKING NORTH

Margaret stood before the drawing-room window, her hands clasped before her, her quiet gaze riveted upon John’s retreating figure.  His hat, firmly set upon his head, accentuated his already proud, lofty height and gave him an undisputable pre-eminence that was strikingly conveyed and that anyone who happened to pass him could not fail but to notice. His black frock coat flapped skittishly around his long legs as he strode purposefully along the pavement, a lone figure dressed entirely in black, except for the very thin band of white of his shirt which peeped shyly from above the collar of his coat and line of his cravat like a timid child wary of being noticed.  Truly, he was the finest of men, the very best of men!  Her heart swelled in unmitigated love for him, shimmering in her breast as she inhaled and then exhaled a deep sigh of joy for the future that had eclipsed, in just one day, all the agony of the past.  He had saved her; they had saved each other.  In him she had entrusted her future – the only future she wished for - and with him she would return to Milton tomorrow. 

She had never expected to feel this way or to experience such a rapier-bladed pang in being separated from now.  A deep ache, its virgin invasion hereuntobefore unfelt until this very evening, clawed brutally at her insides, sharply striking afresh with every step she watched him take further from her, leaving her feeling ever more hollow and bereft and making her long for him to bring her completeness again with his presence. They were two halves that made each other whole. She felt it so strongly, so irrevocably, with more conviction than she had ever felt before.  She wanted to ask Edith if it was the same with her and Maxwell, but knew that she would not.  There was something too personal in the asking, something too revealing about her own feelings towards the man she loved so dearly to pose such a question, even to one she knew as well as Edith. 

Oh!  How new everything was!  How different she herself was!  She could not believe how natural it had felt to submit to the intimacy of his advances.  That she could learn so quickly to respond with such pleasure to this new intoxication of being close to him seemed so strange, so unbelievable, when she thought of their first terrible meeting at the mill and how, from the outset, they had quarrelled so rigorously, both of them so stubborn and wounding in their opinions as they’d hurtled from one misunderstanding to the next.  Now all she longed for was to be in his arms, to be near him.  How gradually love had drawn her into its embrace and shown her that this man, seemingly so strong and sagacious, wholly capable of a quick and brutal temper, had possessed beneath those superfluous layers such kindness, tenderness and passionate intensity. 

Now, as she watched him leave she called out to him in silent supplication, the plaintive words echoing through her small frame: 

Stop…look back!

She willed him to hear her, to respond, her heart virtually arresting in her chest as he stopped abruptly and, as if through some inexplicable and compelling communication of their minds, turned to look back towards the window where she was so engagingly framed.  Her stomach turned inside her in direct response to his actions. Beneath the brim of his hat and in the tenebrous light of the evening his eyes were virtually shadowed, but she caught the unmistakably piercing and refulgent gleam of them as they cleaved to hers. She had lost sight of him so many times in the past as one clash after another had wrenched them apart, but now she saw him clearly - clearer than she had ever done before.  He was standing there before her, as ready and hopefully expectant as she to begin this next chapter of their lives.  

It was then that it seized her: an impulse borne of the timeless moment in which she was captured and one which refused to be tempered by those choking, tight-laced constraints of decorum.  The propriety so beholden of her aunt dispersed like seeds caught by a sudden wind, skimming the air with reckless grace as she blindly followed the audacious call of her heart and lifted her fingers to her lips to blow him an ethereal kiss.  Never in her life before had she done such a thing and, although she found herself to be a little shocked by the spontaneous compulsion that had seized her, she found it too to be utterly empowering.  She saw John’s smile soften in response to her affectionate gesture as he raised his hand to the brim of his hat, tipping it forward briefly in reciprocation.  He lingered a little longer, holding his eyes to hers for a timeless eternity, before finally he turned away to resume the short journey to the hotel in which he was staying.