Part 16 (2/2)
”That will look,” he thought, ”as if I had not overheard his remarks.
How glad I shall be to get away! Oh, for new scenes, new faces! 'How pleasant it is to have money!--heigh-ho!--how pleasant it is to have money!' Whither shall I go? Whither? To Italy, and write my poem? To Paris or Norway? I feel as if I should never care to see this filthy Temple again.” Even the old dining-hall, with its flights of steps and bal.u.s.trades, seemed to have lost all accent of romance; but he stayed to watch the long flight of the pigeons as they came on straightened wings from the gables. ”What familiar birds they are!
Nothing is so like a woman as a pigeon; perhaps that's the reason Norton does not like them. Norton! I haven't seen him for ages--since that morning....” He turned into Pump Court. The doors were wide open; and there was luggage and some packing-cases on the landing.
The floor-matting was rolled, and the screen which protected from draughts the high canonical chair in which Norton read and wrote was overthrown. John was packing his portmanteau, and on either side of him there was a Buddha and Indian warrior which he had lately purchased.
”What, leaving? Giving up your rooms?”
”Yes; I'm going down to Suss.e.x. I do not think it is worth while keeping these rooms on.”
Mike expressed his regret. Mike said, ”No one understands you as I do.” Herein lay the strength of Mike's nature; he won himself through all reserve, and soon John was telling him his state of soul: that he felt it would not be right for him to countenance with his presence any longer the atheism and immorality of the Temple. Lady Helen's death had come for a warning. ”After the burning of my poems, after having sacrificed so much, it was indeed a pitiful thing to find myself one of that shocking revel which had culminated in the death of that woman.”
”There he goes again,” thought Mike, ”running after his conscience like a dog after his tail--a performing dog, too; one that likes an audience.” And to stimulate the mental antics in which he was so much interested, he said, ”Do you believe she is in h.e.l.l?”
”I refrain from judging her. She may have repented in the moment of death. G.o.d is her judge. But I shall never forget that morning; and I feel that my presence at your party imposes on me some measure of responsibility. As for you, Mike, I really think you ought to consider her fate as an omen. It was you ...”
”For goodness' sake, don't. It was Frank who invented the notion that she killed herself because I had been flirting with her. I never heard of anything so ridiculous. I protest. You know the absurdly sentimental view he takes. It is grossly unfair.”
Knowing well how to interest John, Mike defended himself pa.s.sionately, as if he were really concerned to place his soul in a true light; and twenty minutes were agreeably spent in sampling, cla.s.sifying, and judging of motives. Then the conversation turned on the morality of women, and Mike judiciously selected some instances from his stock of experiences whereby John might judge of their animalism. Like us all, John loved to talk sensuality; but it was imperative that the discussion should be carried forward with gravity and reserve. Seated in his high canonical chair, wrapped in his dressing-gown, John would bend forward listening, as if from the Bench or the pulpit, awaking to a more intense interest when some more than usually bitter vial of satire was emptied upon the fair s.e.x. He had once amused Harding very much by his admonishment of a Palais Royal farce.
”It was not,” he said, ”so much the questionableness of the play; what shocked me most was the horrible levity of the audience, the laughter with which every indecent allusion was greeted.”
The conversation had fallen, and Mike said--
”So you are going away? Well, we shall all miss you very much. But you don't intend to bury yourself in the country; you'll come up to town sometimes.”
”I feel I must not stay here; the place has grown unbearable.” A look of horror pa.s.sed over John's face. ”Hall has the rooms opposite. His life is a disgrace; he hurries through his writing, and rushes out to beat up the Strand, as he puts it, for shop-girls. I could not live here any longer.”
Mike could not but laugh a little; and offended, John rose and continued the packing of his Indian G.o.ds. Allusion was made to Byzantine art; and Mike told the story of Frank's marriage; and John laughed prodigiously at the account he gave of the conversation overheard. Regarding the quarrel John was undecided. He found himself forced to admit that Mike's conduct deserved rebuke; but at the same time, Frank's sentimental views were wholly distasteful to him. Then in reply to a question as to where he was going, Mike said he didn't know. John invited him to come and stay at Thornby Place.
”It is half-past three now. Do you think you could get your things packed in time to catch the six o'clock?”
”I think so. I can instruct Southwood; she will forward the rest of my things.”
”Then be off at once; I have a lot to do. Hall is going to take my furniture off my hands. I have made rather a good bargain with him.”
Nothing could suit Mike better. He had never stayed in a country house; and now as he hurried down the Temple, remembrances of Mount Rorke Castle rose in his mind--the parade of dresses on the summer lawns, and the picturesqueness of the shooting parties about the long, withering woods.
CHAPTER VII
For some minutes longer the men lay resting in the heather, their eyes drinking the colour and varied lights and lines of the vast horizon. The downs rose like cliffs, and the dead level of the weald was freckled with brick towns; every hedgerow was visible as the markings on a chess-board; the distant lands were merged in blue vapour, and the windmill on its little hill seemed like a bit out of a young lady's sketch-book.
”How charming it is here!--how delightful! How sorrow seems to vanish, or to hang far away in one's life like a little cloud! It is only in moments of contemplation like this, when our wretched individuality is lost in the benedictive influences of nature, that true happiness is found. Ah! the wonderful philosophy of the East, the wisdom of the ancient races! Christianity is but a vulgarization of Buddhism, an adaptation, an arrangement for family consumption.”
They were not a mile from where John had seen Kitty for a last time.
Now the mere recollection of her jarred his joy in the evening, for he had long since begun to understand that his love of her had been a kind of accident, even as her death a strange unaccountable divagation of his true nature. He had grown ashamed of his pa.s.sion, and he now thought that, like Parsifal, instead of yielding, he should have looked down and seen a cross in the sword's hilt, and the temptation should have pa.s.sed. That cruel death, never explained, so mysterious and so involved in horror! In what measure was he to blame? In what light was he to view this strange death as a symbol, as a sign? And if she had not been killed? If he had married her? To escape from these a.s.saults of conscience he buried his mind in his books and writings, not in his history of Christian Latin, for now his history of those writers appeared to him sterile, and he congratulated himself that he had outgrown love of such paradoxes.
Solemn, and with the great curves of palms, the sky arched above them, and all the coombes filled with all the mystery of evening shadow, and all around lay the sea--a rim of sea illimitable.
<script>