OUR MIDDLE-AGED HERO IS BURDENED BY RESPONSIBILITY BUT BOLDLY UNDERTAKES THE ADVENTURE
 
That same afternoon Maradick finished “To Paradise.” He read it in the room of the minstrels with the sun beating through the panes in pools of gold on to the floor, the windows flung wide open, and a thousand scents and sounds flooding the air. The book had chimed in curiously with the things that were happening to him; perhaps at any other time, and certainly a year ago, he would have flung the book aside with irritation at its slow movement and attenuated action. Now it gave him the precisely correct sensation; it was the atmosphere that he had most effectually realised during these last weeks suddenly put for him clearly on to paper. Towards the end of the book there was this passage: “And indeed Nature sets her scene as carefully as any manager on our own tiny stage; we complain discordantly of fate, and curse our ill-luck when, in reality, it is because we have disregarded our setting that we have suffered. Passing lights, whether of sailing ships or huddled towns, murmuring streams heard through the dark but not seen, the bleating of countless sheep upon a dusky hill, are all, with a thousand other formless incoherent things, but sign-posts to show us our road. And let us, with pressing fingers, wilfully close our ears and blind our eyes, then must we suffer. Changes may come suddenly upon a man, and he will wonder; but let him look around him and he will see that he is subject to countless other laws and orders, and that he plays but a tiny r?le in a vast and moving scene.”
He rose and stretched his arms. He had not for twenty years felt the blood race through his veins as it did to-day. Money? Office stools? London? No; Romance, Adventure. He would have his time now that it had come to him. He could not talk to his wife about it; she would not understand; but Mrs. Lester——
The door opened suddenly. He turned round. No one had ever interrupted him there before; he had not known that anyone else had discovered the place, and then he saw that it was Lester himself. He came forward with that curious look that he often had of seeing far beyond his immediate surroundings. He stared now past the room into the blue and gold of the Cornish dusk; the vague misty leaves of some tree hung, a green cloud, against the sky, two tiny glittering stars shone in the sky above the leaves, as though the branches had been playing with them and had tossed them into the air.
Then he saw Maradick.
“Hullo! So you’ve discovered this place too?” He came towards him with that charming, rather timid little smile that he had. “I found it quite by chance yesterday, and have been absolutely in love with it——”
“Yes,” said Maradick, “I’ve known it a long time. Curiously enough, we were here last year and I never found it.” Then he added: “I’ve just finished your book. May I tell you how very much I’ve enjoyed it? It’s been quite a revelation to me; its beauty——”
“Thank you,” said Lester, smiling, “it does one a lot of good when one finds that some one has cared about one’s work. I think that I have a special affection for this one, it had more of myself in it. But will you forgive my saying it, I had scarcely expected you, Maradick, to care about it.”
“Why?” asked Maradick. Lester’s voice was beautifully soft and musical, and it seemed to be in tune with the room, the scene, the hour.
“Well, we are, you know, in a way at the opposite ends of the pole. You are practical; a business man; it is your work, your place in life, to be practical. I am a dreamer through and through. I would have been practical if I could. I have made my ludicrous attempts, but I have long ago given it up. I have been cast for another r?le. The visions, the theories, the story of such a man as I am must seem stupidly, even weakly vague and insufficient to such a man as you. I should not have thought that ‘To Paradise’ could have seemed to you anything but a moonstruck fantasy. Perhaps that is what it really is.”
He spoke a little sadly, looking out at the sky. “I am afraid that is what it is,” he said.
“Is it not possible,” said Maradick slowly, “that a man should, at different times in his life, have played both r?les? Can one not be practical and yet have one’s dreams? Can one not have one’s dreams and yet be practical?”
As he spoke he looked at the man and tried to see him from Mrs. Lester’s point of view. He was little and brown and nervous; his eyes were soft and beautiful, but they were the eyes of a seer.
Mr. Lester shook his head. “I think it is possible to be practical and yet to have your dreams. I will not deny that you have yours; but the other thing—no, I shall never see the world as it is. And yet, you know,” he went on, smiling a little, “the world will never let me alone. I think that at last I shall see that for which I have been searching, that at last I shall hear that for which I have been listening so long; and then suddenly the world breaks in upon it and shatters it, and it vanishes away. One has one’s claims, one is not alone; but oh! if I had only an hour when there might be no interruption. But I’m really ashamed, Maradick; this must seem, to put it bluntly, so much rot to you, and indeed to anyone except myself.”
“No,” said Maradick. “I think I understand more than you would expect. A month ago it might have been different, but now——”
“Ah,” said Lester, laughing, “the place has caught you, as it does everyone.”
“No, not only the place,” said Maradick slowly, “there is something else. I was here last year, but I did not feel, I did not see as I do now.”
“Yes, it’s Tony Gale as well.”
“Tony?”
“Yes. Believe me, there’s nothing that a boy like that cannot do with his happiness and youth. It goes out from him and spreads like a magic wand. If people only knew how much they owed to that kind of influence——”
“Well, perhaps it is Tony,” said Maradick, laughing. “I am fonder of him than I can say; but, whatever the cause, the dreams are there.”
Lester took out a book from under his arm. It was long and thin and bound in grey parchment.
“Here,” he said, “is a book that perhaps you know. It is one of the most beautiful comedies in our language. This man was a dreamer too, and his dreams are amongst the most precious things that we have. I may write to the end of time, but I shall never reach that exquisite beauty.”
Maradick took the book; it was Synge’s “Play-boy of the Western World.” He had never heard of the man or of the play. He turned its pages curiously.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that I’ve never heard of it. It is Irish, I see. I think I do remember vaguely when the Dublin players were in London last year hearing something. The man has died, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, and he didn’t leave very much behind him, but what there is is of the purest gold. See, listen to this, one of the greatest love-scenes in our language. It is a boy and a girl in a lonely inn on an Irish moor.”
He read:—
The Girl.—“What call have you to be that lonesome when there’s poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now?”
The Boy.—“It’s well you know what call I have. It’s well you know it’s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you’d hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty stomach failing from your heart.”
Maradick listened to the beautiful words and his eyes glowed. The dusk was falling in the room, and half-lights of gold and purple hovered over the fireplace and the gallery. The leaves of the tree had changed from green to dark grey, and, above them, where there had been two stars there were now a million.
“And again,” said Lester, “listen to this.”
The Boy.—“When the airs is warming in four months or five, it’s then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin in the dews of night, the time sweet smells do be rising, and you’d see a little shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.”
The Girl. (playfully).—“And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?”
The Boy.—“It’s little you’ll think if my love’s a poacher’s or an earl’s itself, when you’ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God in all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.”
The Girl.—“That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence or talk at all.”
The Boy (encouraged).—“Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we’re astray in Ennis, when Good Friday’s by, drinking a sup from a well and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth.”
The Girl (in a low voice moved by his tone).—“I’d be nice so, is it?”
The Boy (with rapture).—“If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they’d be the like of the holy prophets, I’m thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.”
He stopped, and sat, silently, with the book in front of him. The half-light in the room spread into a circle of pale rose-colour immediately round the window; the night sky was of the deepest blue.
To Maradick it was as though the place itself had spoken. The colour of the day had taken voice and whispered to him.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very beautiful. Would you lend it to me some time?”
“Delighted,” said Lester. “You can have it now if you like. Take it with you. The whole play won’t keep you more than half an hour. I have his other things, if you care to look at them.”
Maradick went off to dress with the book under his arm.
When he came down to the drawing-room he found Mrs. Lester there alone. Only one lamp was lit and the curtains were not drawn, so that the dusky sky glowed with all its colours, blue and gold and red, beyond the windows.
When he saw Mrs. Lester he stopped for a moment at the door. The lamplight fell on one cheek and some dark bands of her hair, the rest of her face was in shadow. She smiled when she saw him.
“Ah! I’m so glad that you’ve come down before the rest. I’ve been wanting to speak to you all day and there has been no opportunity.”
“Your husband has been showing me a wonderful play by that Irishman, Synge,” he said. “I hadn’t heard of him. I had no idea——”
She laughed. “You’ve struck one of Fred’s pet hobbies,” she said; “start him on Synge and he’ll never stop. It’s nice for a time—at first, you know; but Synge for ever—well, it’s like living on wafers.”
She sighed and leaned back in her chair. She spoke in a low voice, and it gave a note of intimacy to their conversation. As she looked at him she thought again what a fine man he was. Evening dress suited him, and the way that he sat, leaning a little towards her with his head raised and the lamplight falling on his chin and throat, gave her a little thrill of pleasure. He was very big and strong, and she contrasted him with her husband. Maradick would probably be a bore to live with, whilst Fred, as a matter of fact, did very well. But for playing a game this was the very man, if, indeed, he knew that it was only a game; it would be a dreadful nuisance if he took it seriously.
“How long are you staying here?” she said. “We shall stop for another fortnight, I suppose, unless my husband suddenly takes it into his head to run away. Even then I shall probably stay. I love the place; let me see—to-day’s the fourteenth—yes, we shall probably be here until the twenty-eighth.”
“I must get back when the month is up,” said Maradick.
“But I hate to think of going back. I’m enjoying every minute of it, but I don’t think my wife will be sorry. The heat doesn’t suit her.”
“I hope,” she bent forward a little and laid her hand on his chair, “that you didn’t think it very impertinent of me to speak as I did at the picnic the other day. I thought afterwards that I had, perhaps, said too much. But then I felt that you were different from most men, that you would understand. I trust too much, I think, to intuition.”
“No, please don’t think that,” he said eagerly. “We have only got another fortnight here. Why shouldn’t we be friends? I’m beginning to think that I have wasted too much of my life by being afraid of going too far, of saying the wrong thing. I have begun to understand life differently since I have been here.”
Whether he implied that it was since he had known her that he had begun to understand, she did not know; at any rate she would take it for that. “There are so many things that I could tell you,” she said. “I think you are to be trusted. It is not often that a woman can feel that about anyone.”
“Thank you for saying that,” he said, looking her full in the face; “I will try and deserve it.”
She touched his hand with hers and felt a delicious little thrill, then she heard steps and moved to the fireplace.
Lady Gale and Alice Du Cane came into the room, and it was evident at once that they were upset. Lady Gale talked to Maradick, but it was obvious that her mind was elsewhere.
“Has Tony been with you this afternoon?” she said. “Alice says she saw him about four o’clock, but no one has seen him since. He hasn’t come back, apparently.”
“No,” Maradick said, “I haven’t seen him since breakfast.”
She looked at him for a moment, and he felt that her look had something of reproach in it. He suddenly was conscious that he was, in their eyes at any rate, responsible for anything that Tony might do. He ought to have stood guard. And, after all, where had the boy been? He should have been back by now.
“It is really too bad,” Lady Gale said. “He knows that his father dislikes unpunctuality at meals above all things, and he has been late again and again just lately. I must speak to him. He’s later than ever to-night. Where did you see him, Alice?”
“Down on the sand. But he didn’t see me.” She spoke uneasily, and Maradick saw at once that she was keeping something back.
“He’s been going about with a Punch and Judy man recently,” said Mrs. Lester. “I have nothing to say against Punch and Judy men personally. I always want to stop in the street and watch; but as a continual companion——”
“This particular one,” said Maradick, “is especially nice, an awfully decent little fellow. I’ve talked to him several times. No, Lady Gale, I’m afraid my wife isn’t well enough to come down to-night. She’s had a bad headache all day. It’s this heat, I think.” He looked at her rather as a guilty schoolboy watches his master. He reproached himself for having left the boy alone during the whole day, and he began to be anxious on his own account. The situation was getting too much for his nerves. For the first time he considered Alice Du Cane. He had not thought of her as being very actively concerned in the business, but there was something in her face now that spoke of trouble. She was standing by the lamp nervously fingering some books at her side. The thought that she was in trouble touched him, and he began to feel the burden of the situation still more heavily upon him.
But he knew at once what it was that was troubling Lady Gale. It was Sir Richard. He had seen enough of that Gentleman to know that so long as superficial things were all right, so long as bells rang at the proper moment and everyone immediately concerned with him were respectful and decently dressed, he would ask no questions; but let him once begin to have suspicions that something was lacking in respect to himself and the family generally and nothing would hinder his irritable curiosity. He had probably begun already to ask questions about Tony. Here was a new element of danger.
The door opened and everyone turned eagerly towards it; it was Sir Richard and Rupert.
Rupert didn’t appear to be more concerned than was usual with him, but Sir Richard was evidently annoyed. He advanced into the room with his customary before-dinner manner, that of one about to lead a cavalry regiment to the charge.
“It’s late,” he said; “late. Where’s Tony?”
It was the question that everyone had been expecting, but no one answered it for a moment. Then Lady Gale got up from her chair.
“He’ll be in in a minute, I expect,” she said. “He’s been kept. But it’s no use waiting for dinner. I suppose Fred will be late, Millie? Never mind, we’ll go down. You’ll dine with us, Mr. Maradick, won’t you?”
Sir Richard led the way with ominous silence.
The room was quite full, and for a breathless, agitated moment it seemed that their own table had been taken; but the alarm was false, and everyone could breathe again. Lady Gale’s life was spent in the endeavour to prevent her husband from discovering a grievance. Let it once be discovered and a horrible time was before her, for Sir Richard petted it and nursed it until it grew, with a rapidity that was outside nature, into a horrible monster whose every movement caused the house to tremble.
She saw them, those grievances, come creeping round the corner and at once her hand was out and she held them, strangled, in her grip, and the danger was averted. Tony had often before been responsible for these agitations, but she had always caught them in time; now, she realised it as she crossed the dining-room, she was too late, and every moment of Tony’s absence made matters worse. Sir Richard looked at the menu, and then complained about it in monosyllables for several minutes. Maradick watched the door with nervous eyes. This intrusion of Sir Richard into the business complicated things horribly. Let him once suspect that Tony was carrying on an affair with some girl in the town and the boy would at once be sent away; that, of course, would mean the end of everything, for him as well as for Tony. The Gales would go, the Lesters would go—everyone, everything. Tony himself would not allow it to be left at that, but, after all, what could he do?
Alice Du Cane was talking excitedly about nothing in particular, Mrs. Lester was very quiet, Rupert, as usual, was intent upon his food. Alice chattered at Mrs. Lester, “Lucy Romanes was there; you know, that ridiculous girl with the scraped back hair and the pink complexion. Oh! too absurd for anything! You know Muriel Halliday said that she simply spends her days in following Captain Fawcett round. He rather likes it . . . the sort of man who would. I can’t stand the girl.”
Mrs. Lester smiled across the table. “It’s old Mrs. Romanes’s fault. She sends her round, she can’t get rid of any of her girls anywhere . . . five of them, poor things; she’d sell any of them for twopence.”
Sir Richard had finished his soup, and he leaned across the table towards his wife.
“What is the boy doing?” he said.
“Really, Richard, I don’t know. He’s been out sailing, I expect, and the wind or something has kept him.”
“I won’t have it”; he glowered at everyone. “He knows when meals are, he must be here. I must have obedience; and now I come to think of it”—he paused and looked round the table—“it has happened often lately. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but I remember now; frequently—yes—late.”
Then, after a pause during which no one said a word, “What has he been doing?”
This was so precisely the question that everyone else had been asking carefully and surreptitiously during the last few days that everyone looked guilty, as though they had been discovered in a crime. Then everyone turned to Maradick.
He smiled. “I’ve been about with him a good deal lately, Sir Richard. I really don’t know what we’ve done very much beyond walking. But I think he was going to sail this afternoon.”
Lady Gale looked anxiously at the waiter. If the food were all right the danger might be averted. But of course on this night of all nights everything was wrong: the potatoes were hard, the peas harder, the meat was overdone. Sir Richard glared at the waiter.
“Ask Mr. Bannister if he would spare me a minute,” he said. Bannister appeared as spherical and red-cheeked as ever.
“Things are disgraceful to-night,” Sir Richard said. “I must beg you, Mr. Bannister, to see to it.”
Bannister was gently apologetic. The cook should be spoken to, it was abominable; meanwhile was there anything that he could get for Sir Richard? No? He was sorry. He bowed to the ladies and withdrew.
“It’s abominable—this kind of thing. And Tony? Why, it’s quarter to nine; what does he mean? It’s always happening. Are these people he knows in the town?”
He looked at his wife.
“I really don’t know, dear. I expect that he’s met people down there; it’s probable. But I shouldn’t worry, dear. I’ll speak to him.” She looked across at Alice. “What were you saying about Mrs. Romanes, dear? I used to know her a long while ago; I don’t suppose she would remember me now.”
Maradick had a miserable feeling that she blamed him for all this. If he had only looked after Tony and stayed with him this would never have happened. But he couldn’t be expected to stay with Tony always. After all, the boy was old enough to look after himself; it was absurd. Only, just now perhaps it would have been wiser. He saw that Mrs. Lester was smiling. She was probably amused at the whole affair.
Suddenly at the farther end of the room some one came in. It was Tony. Maradick held his breath.
He looked so perfectly charming as he stood there, recognising, with a kind of sure confidence, the “touch” that was necessary to carry the situation through. He could see, of course, that it was a situation, but whether he recognised the finer shades of everyone’s feeling about it—the separate, individual way that they were all taking it, so that Alice’s point of view and his mother’s point of view and Maradick’s point of view were all, really, at the opposite ends of the pole as far as seeing the thing went—that was really the important question. They all were needing the most delicate handling, and, in fact, from this moment onwards the “fat” was most hopelessly in the fire and the whole business was rolling “tub-wise” down ever so many sharp and precipitous hills.
But he stood there, looking down at them, most radiantly happy. His hair was still wet from his bath, and his tie was a little out of place because he had dressed in a hurry, and he smiled at them all, taking them, as it were, into his heart and scolding them for being so foolishly inquisitive, and, after it all, letting them no further into his confidence.
He knew, of course, exactly how to treat his father; his mother was more difficult, but he could leave her until afterwards.
To Sir Richard’s indignant “Well?” he answered politely, but with a smile and a certain hurried breathlessness to show that he had taken trouble.
“Really, I’m awfully sorry.” He sat down and turned, with a smile, to the company. “I’m afraid I’m dreadfully late, but it was ever so much later than I’d thought. I was most awfully surprised when I saw the clock upstairs. I’ve smashed my own watch. You remember, mother, my dropping it when we were down in the town. Tuesday, wasn’t it? Yes, I’ll have soup, please. I say, I hope you people won’t mind; I suppose you’ve about finished, but I’m going right through everything. I’m just as hungry as I can jolly well be. No, no sherry, thanks.”
But Sir Richard’s solemnity was imperturbable. “Where have you been?” he said coldly. “You know how strongly I dislike unpunctuality at meal-times, yes, unpunctuality. And this is not only unpunctuality, it is positively missing it altogether; I demand an explanation.”
This public scolding before all the assembled company seemed to Maradick in very bad taste, and he shifted uneasily in his chair, but Tony did not seem to mind.
“I know,” he said, looking up from his soup and smiling at his father, “I am most awfully careless. But it wasn’t all that, as a matter of fact. I rowed round the Point to Boulter’s Cove, and the tides a............