Christian strolled aimlessly about for a long time in the closely packed congeries of streets, little and big, behind St. Paul’s. It happened to be all new ground to him, and something novel was welcome to his troubled and restless mind. He loitered from one window to another, examining their contents gravely; at the old book stalls he took down numbers of volumes and looked laboriously through them, as if conducting an urgent search for something.
His jumbled thoughts were a burden to him. He could get nothing coherent from them, It was not even clear to his perception whether he was really as dejected and disconsolate as he ought to be.
He had only recently been plunged into despairing depths of sadness, and it was fitting that he should still be racked with anguish. Yet there was no actual pain—there was not even a dogged insensibility to the frivolous distractions of the moment. He became exceedingly interested in an old copy of Boutell, for example, and hunted eagerly through the multitude of heraldic cuts to see if the white bull on a green ground of the Torrs was among them. His disappointment at not finding it was so keen that for the instant it superseded his abiding grief. His discovery of this fact entertained him; he was almost capable of laughing in amusement at it. Then, in self-condemnation, he sought to call up before his mental vision the picture of Frances, as she had looked when they had said good-bye. The image would not come distinctly. Her face eluded him; he could only see her walking away, instead, under the feeble green of the young trees. None the less, he said deliberately to himself that he was unhappy beyond the doom of most men, and that the hope had gone out of his life.
The day had turned out unexpectedly warm. In the middle of his shapeless musings, the ornate sign of a Munich brewery on a cool, shaded doorway suddenly attracted him. The dusky, restful emptiness of the place inside seemed ideally to fit his mood. He went in, and seated himself with a long sigh of satisfaction at one of the tables. Here, in this mellow quiet, over the refreshing contents of the big, covered stone mug, he could think peacefully and to advantage. He lit a cigar, and leaning back in comfort, gave the signal to his thoughts to arrange and concentrate themselves.
What should he do next? Yes—that was far more to the point than mooning over the irrevocable past. He had left Duke Street with hardly any plan beyond not returning thither. Luggage of some sort he would have to have—changes of linen and the like, and the necessary articles of the toilet. It was his intention to buy these as the need of them arose—and the character of his purchases would also depend a good deal, of course, upon the decision he should come to concerning his movements. He had said that he would leave England—and now he asked himself whether there was anything to prevent his departure that very evening. One of the deepest charms of travel must be to start off on the instant, upon the bidding of the immediate whim, and descend upon your destination before there has been time to cheapen it by thinking about it. Why should he not eat the morrow’s breakfast in the Hague—and dine at Amsterdam? Similarly, he could within twenty-four hours be watching the marriage of Mosel and Rhine at Coblenz—or gazing upon the wide, wet, white sands of the Norman shore from the towering battlements of St. Michel. A hundred storied towns, vaguely pictured in his imagination, beckoned to him from across the Channel. Upon reflection, it seemed to him that Holland offered the most wooing invitation. He asked the waiter for Bradshaw, and noted the salient points of the itinerary from Queen borough.
It was now three o’clock. There was plenty of time for all purchases, and a leisurely dinner before going to Victoria. It occurred to him that the dinner must be very good—a luxurious kind of farewell repast.
He would make a memorandum now of the things he ought to buy here in London. Holland was by all accounts a dear place—and moreover he had heard that the Dutch customs examination was by no means troublesome. It would be more intelligent to complete practically his outfit here. He took out a pencil, and began feeling in his coat-pocket for a bit of paper. The hand brought out, beside Lady Milly’s note about the Private View, three or four unopened letters. He had entirely forgotten their existence—and stared at them now in puzzled indecision. It was not a sensible thing, or a fair thing either, to tear up and destroy unread the message which some one else had been at pains to transcribe for you. But on the other hand, these missives belonged to the stupid and intolerable life in Duke Street, with which he had definitely parted company. It might even be said, in one sense, that he was not the person to whom they were addressed.
By some whimsical freak of the brain, he suddenly asked himself whether he should not go to Greece instead of Holland, and enlist as a volunteer in the war against the Turks. He became on the instant immersed in adventurous military speculations. He had not fallen into the English habit of following the daily papers with regularity, and he was conscious of no responsibility whatever toward the events of the world at large, as Reuter and the correspondents chronicled them. Something of this new war in Thessaly, however, he had perforce read and heard. Of the circumstances and politics surrounding this latest eruption of the Eastern Question he knew little more than would any of the young Frenchmen of education among whom he had spent his youth. But in an obscure way, he comprehended that good people in Western Europe always sympathized with the Christian as against the Moslem. It seemed that some generous-minded young Englishmen were already translating this sympathy into action; somewhere he had seen an account of a party of volunteers leaving London for Athens, and being cheered by their friends at the station. Now that he thought of it, the paper in which he had read the report had ridiculed the affair as an undesirable kind of a joke—but the impulse of the volunteers seemed fine to him, none the less.
There ought to be some martial blood in his veins; the soldier-figure of his father rose before him in affirmation of the idea.
But no—what nonsense it was! If ever there had been a youth bred and narrowed to the walks of peace, he was that young person. He who had never struck another human being in his life, that he could remember—what would such a tame sheep be doing in the open field, against the unknown, ferocious Osmanli Turk? The gross absurdity of the picture flared upon him, momentarily—and then the whole notion of armed adventure had vanished from his mind.
His attention reverted to the letters—and now it seemed quite a matter of course that he should open them. The first three were of no importance. The fourth he regarded with wide-open eyes, after he had grasped the identity of the writer. He read it over slowly, more than once:
“27A Ashley Gardens, S. W., Monday.
“My Dear Mr. Christian Tower: I have taken this little place in town for the time being, and I shall be glad to see you when you are this way. To-morrow, Tuesday, is a day when I shall not be at home to other people—if you have nothing better to do.
“Yours very sincerely,
“Edith Cressage.”
Nothing better to do? Christian’s thoughts lingered rather blankly upon the phrase—until all at once he perceived that there could not possibly be anything better to do. He rose with decision, hurriedly gulped what remained of his second pot of beer, paid his bill and marched out with the air of a man with a mission.
In the hansom, he read the letter still again, and leaned backward to see as much as possible of himself in the little mirror at the side. His chin could not be described as closely shaven, and his garments were certainly not those of the afternoon caller. The resource of stopping at Duke Street occurred to him—but no! that would be too foolish. The whole significance of the day would be abolished, wiped out, by such a fatuous step. And he repeated to himself that it was a day of supreme significance. By comparison with the proceedings and experiences of this long and crowded day, the rest of his life seemed colorless indeed. And what was of most importance in it, he declared to himself, was not its external happenings, but the fine and novel posture of his liberated mind toward them. He was for the first time actually a free man. His enfranchisement had not been thrown at him by outsiders; it proceeded from within him—the product of his own individuality.
That was what people would discern in him hereafter—a complete and self-sufficient personality. He would no longer be pointed out and classified as somebody’s grandson—somebody’s cousin or grand-nephew. The world would recognize him as being himself. He felt assured, for example, upon reflection that Lady Cressage would not dream of questioning the fashion of the clothes in which he came to see her. She would perceive at once that he had developed beyond the silly pupilary stage of subordination to his coat and hat. She was so clever and sympathetic a woman, he felt intuitively, that these symbols of his emancipated condition would delight her. It was true, he saw again from the mirror that his collar might be a little whiter; his cuffs, too, had lost their earlier glow of starched freshness. But these were trifles to serious minds. And besides, was it not all in the family?
There was a momentary block at the corner of Parliament Street, and here a newsboy thrust a fourth edition upon Christian with such an effect of authority that he found a penny and took the paper. It was the “Westminster Gazette,” and when he had looked upon the second page for a possible drawing by Gould, and had skimmed the column of desultory gossip on the last page, which always seemed to his alien conceptions of journalism to be the kind of matter he liked in a newspaper, he laid the sheet on his knee, and resumed his idle reverie. To his great surprise the cabman’s shouts through the roof were necessary to awaken him at Ashley Gardens. He shook himself, laughingly explained that he had been up all night as he paid his fare, and ascended the steps of 27A, paper in hand.
The servant seemed prepared for his coming, for upon giving his name in response to her somewhat meaning inquiry, she led him in at once. He sat waiting for a few moments in a small and conveniently appointed drawing-room, and then stood up, at the rustle of rapid skirts which announced Lady Cressage in the half-open doorway.
She entered with outstretched hand, and a radiant welcome upon her face.
Christian noted that beyond the hand there was a forearm, shapely and cream-hued, disclosed by the lace of her flowing sleeve. There were billows of this lace, and of some fragile, light fabric which seemed sister to it, enveloping the lady, yet her tall, graceful figure was in some indefinable way molded to the eye beneath them all. The pale hair was as he had first seen it, loosely drawn across her temples; there were warm shadows in it which he had not thought to see. The face, too, had some unexpected phase, here in the subdued light of the curtained room. There was a sense of rosiness in the rounded flesh, a certain reposeful elation in the regard of the blue eyes, which put quite at fault the image of harrowed restlessness and nerves he had retained from Caermere. It was in an illuminating second that he saw all this, and perceived that she was very beautiful, and flushed with the deep consciousness that she read his thoughts like big print.
“It was the greatest cheek in the world—my summoning you like this,” she said, as they shook hands. “Yes—sit here. Put your hat and paper on the sofa. This is my only reception room—but we might have a little more light.”
She moved to the window, to pull back the curtains, and then about the room, lightly rearranging some of the chairs and trinkets—all with a buoyant daintiness of motion which inexpressibly charmed him. “These are not my things, you know,” she explained over her shoulder. “I am not trying in the least to live up to them, either. I take the place, furnished, for three months, from the widow of an Indian officer. You would think she would have some Indian things—but it might have all come direct from Tottenham Court Road. It’s impossible to get the slightest sensation of being at home, here. One could really extract more domesticity out of four bare cottage walls. Or no, what am I saying?”—she had returned, and sinking into the low chair opposite him, pointed her words with a frank smile into his face—-“it is a bit like home—to see you here!”
“I am very glad to be here,” he assured her, nodding his unfeigned pleasure. “But it seemed as if you would never tell me I might come.”
“Oh, I was worried to death. There were all sorts of things to see about when I first came up,” she explained with animation. “And I had the feeling that I didn’t want you to come till I had smoothed some of my wrinkles out, and had achieved a certain control over my nerves. It was not fair to myself—the view you had of me at Caermere.”
The view of her that was afforded him here brought a glow of admiration to his eyes.
“To think of your being my cousin!” he said, with some remote echo in his own voice of the surprise which he recalled in Dicky Westland’s tone. It seemed wonderful indeed as he looked at her, and smiled. He shook his head presently, in response to her question whether he had any recent news from Caermere, and continued to observe her with a rapt sense of the miraculous being embodied before his eyes.
“But the duke is very low indeed,” she told him in a hushed voice. “I had it yesterday from—from one of the household.”
The tidings barely affected him. That side of his mind was still fast in the rut of last night’s mutiny.
“I have quite decided to go away,” he announced, calmly. “I get no good out of the life here. It does not suit me. Whatever comes to me, why, that I shall accept, but to use it in my own way, living my own life. Now that I am a free man, it astonishes me that I did not rebel long ago.”
“Rebel—against what?” she asked him, with a kind of confidential candor which put him even more at his ease.
“Oh, against everything,” he smiled back at her. “This existence that they arranged for me—it is like being embalmed and wrapped in mummy-cloths. Personally I do not survive a thousand years—but I am but one link in a long chain of respectable people who have lived like that, without living at all, for many thousands. It is being buried alive. Why, you will see what I mean—a man is a creature different from other human creatures. He has an individual nature of his own. His tastes, his inclinations, his impulses and ideas, are not quite like those of the people about him. He would be happy to follow these according to his own wishes. But then everybody seizes upon him and says: ‘No, you must be and do just like the rest. You will be noticed and disliked if you indulge in even the slightest variation. These are the coats you are to wear, and the hats and caps and neckties. This is Duke Street, which you must live in. This is the hour to get up, this is the hour to make calls, this is the corner of your card to turn down, this is the list of people at whose houses you must dine, these are your friends ready-made for you out of a book.’ And truly what is it all?—utter, utter emptiness. You are really not alive at all! You have no more personal sensation of your own existence than an insect. It is all this that I rebel against.”
She reclined a little in her chair, and covered him with a meditative gaze. “I know the feeling,” she commented thoughtfully. “I used to have sharp spasms of it—oh, ages ago—whenever a shopwoman showed me something, and said, ‘This is very much worn just now,’ or, ‘We are selling a great deal of this.’ Then I would not have that particular thing if I died for it. But do you really feel so earnestly about it?” She put the question in deference to a gesture by which he had signified the inadequacy of her comparison. “Ah, the real life, as you call it, is a more complicated thing than one fancies.”
“But that is precisely the point,” with vivacity. “I have thought much about that. Is it not the artificial life which is complicated instead? Do we not confound the two? If you consider it, what can be more simple that the natural life of a man? If an astronomer, for example, has a difficult problem to work out, he first busies himself in discovering and putting aside all the things which seem to be factors in it but really are not. One by one he gets rid of them, until at last he has the naked equation before him—and then a result is possible. But with us, it seems that we go quite the other way about it. We take the problem of life—which is extraordinarily simple to begin with—and we pile upon it and around it thousands of outside rules and conventions and traditions, and we confuse it with other thousands of prejudices, and insincerities, and old mistakes that no one has had the industry to examine—and then we look with embarrassment at what we have done, and shake our heads, and say that the problem is too hard, that it passes the wisdom of man to solve it.”
“I wish you joy of solving it,” she remarked, after another reflective survey of his face. “I am sure I wish some one would do it. But you spoke of going away. How would that help matters?”
The recurrence of the question startled him. He looked at her with lifted head, recalling swiftly meanwhile the tone in which Frances had uttered those same words. A blurred, imperfect retrospect of the morning’s events and talks passed fleetingly acro............