The Far Horizon Part 24

George Lovegrove walked beside him in silence, his eyes downcast, his heart stirred by vague tumultuous sympathy, his modest nature at once inflamed and abashed, recognising in his companion the hero of an exalted and tragic romance.

"Well, he looks it. It suits his character and appearance," he said to himself, adding aloud--for the very life of him he could not help it-- "But she was very beautiful, Dominic."

"Yes," Iglesias answered, "she is beautiful and very clever and--very unhappy."

The good George's heart positively thumped against his ribs. "And to think of all the plans the wife and I have been making!" he said to himself.

"If she wants me, she will send for me," Iglesias continued quietly, "and I shall go to her at once, as I went that evening, without hesitation or delay, wherever she may be. But," he added, "it becomes increasingly improbable that she will send for me. I have not seen her or heard from her since that night. And so, my dear friend, you perceive that your kindly fears of having circ.u.mscribed my liberty of choice in respect of a place of residence are quite unfounded. I have no reason for leaving Cedar Lodge or altering my accustomed habits."

Iglesias smiled affectionately, as dismissing the whole matter.

"And now," he continued, "that little misunderstanding being cleared up, will you mind my turning into the restaurant just here, in High Street, for a cup of coffee and a roll? I have not breakfasted yet."

Whereupon George Lovegrove pranced before him, incoherent in kindly remonstrance and advice.

"At 11 A. M., and after your severe indisposition at Christmas, too, out walking on an empty stomach! It is positively suicidal. Where have you been to?" he cried.

"To Ma.s.s," Iglesias answered, still smiling, though with something of a fighting light in his eyes and a lift of his head.

His companion stared at him in blank amazement.

"To what?" he said.

"To Ma.s.s," Iglesias repeated. "I have been waiting for a suitable opportunity to speak to you of this, George. I, too, have felt the weight of enforced leisure. It has not been a particularly cheerful experience; but it has given me time to read, and still more to think, with the consequence that I have returned to the faith of my childhood. I have made my peace with the Church."

They continued to walk slowly onward; but George Lovegrove drew away to the further side of the path as though contact might be dangerous, as though infection was hanging about. He kept his eyes averted, his head bent.

"You do surprise me," he said at last. "I had not the slightest inkling that you were contemplating such a step. I give you my word, you have fairly taken away my breath. I do not seem to be able to grasp it, that you, whom I have always looked up to as so mentally superior, so independent in your thought, should have become a Romanist--for that is your meaning, I take it, Dominic?"

"Yes, that is my meaning," Iglesias answered.

"You do surprise me," George Lovegrove said again presently, and in a lamentable voice. "My mind refuses to grasp it. I would rather have lost five hundred pounds than have heard this. I declare I am fairly unmanned. I have never received a greater shock."

Iglesias remained silent. He was weary and sad. But he straightened himself, trying to keep his gaze fixed steadily upon the far horizon where dwells the everlasting light.

"It is presumptuous in me to criticise your action, perhaps," his companion continued. "I never did such a thing before, having always hesitated to set up my views against yours; but I cannot but fear you have made a sad mistake. And if you were contemplating any change of this kind, why did you not come into our own national English Church?"

"Very much because it is English and national, I think," he answered.

"In my opinion there is an inherent falsity of conception in subjecting our approach to the Absolute to restrictions imposed by country or by race, if these can, by any means, be avoided. Why hamper yourself with a late, expurgated, and mutilated edition, when the original, in all its splendour and historic completeness, bearing the sign-manual of the Author, is there ready to your hand?"

Again Iglesias spoke with subdued but unmistakable enthusiasm. The two friends had just reached the iron gate leading into High Street. Here George Lovegrove stopped. He still kept carefully at a distance, averting his eyes as from some distressing, even disgraceful, sight, while his good honest face worked with emotion.

"I think if you will kindly excuse me, I will go no farther," he faltered. "What you say may be true--I am sure I don't know. It is all beyond me. But I should prefer not to talk any more about it until I have accustomed myself to the thought of this change in you. Nothing does come between people like religion," he added with unconscious irony. "So I think, if you will kindly excuse me, I will just go away, Dominic."

And, without more ado, he turned back into the Gardens.

The small polar bears, meanwhile, satiated with exercise, air, and light, had begun to grow restive and fretty. Their stomachs cried cupboardwards, and they were disposed to filch each other's toy horses and hoops, and use each other's small persons as targets for b.a.l.l.s, thrown as bombs in a fashion far from polite. Anxious maids and nurses hunted them homewards, not without slight asperity on the one part, on the other occasional squealings and free fights. But upon the babies, engaging even in naughtiness, George Lovegrove had ceased to bestow any attention. He went forward blindly, cruising among them and their attendants and smart little carriages, elephantine, careless where he placed his feet, to the obstruction of traffic and heightening of general annoyance, as sorrowful a man as any would need to meet. For it seemed to him things had gone wrong, just then, past all hope of setting right. His idol, light of his eyes and joy of his guileless heart, has fallen from his high estate, discovering capacity of playing the most discreditable and soul-harrowing pranks. Prejudice is myriad-lived here on earth; and in George Lovegrove all the bigotry, all the semi-superst.i.tious, terror fostered by the acc.u.mulated ignorance which generations of Protestant forefathers have bequeathed to the English middle-cla.s.s, reared itself, not only stubborn, but militant. His thought travelled back to those barbarities of rougher ages which are, in point of fact, more common to the secular than to the religious criminal code; but which Protestant teachers, even yet, find it convenient to put down wholly to the account of the Catholic Church. Practically ignorant of the spoliation and persecution practised under Henry the Eighth--of blessed domestic memory--of the further persecution which disfigured the "s.p.a.cious days of great Elizabeth," not to mention the long and shameful history of the Penal Laws, he fixed his mind upon lurid legends of the reign of unhappy Mary Tudor, ill.u.s.trated by prints in Fox's Book of Martyrs; upon inquisitorial tortures, the very thought of which--even out of doors in the pleasant spring sunshine--made him break into a heavy sweat, and which, by some grotesque perversion of ideas, he believed to be not only the necessary outcome of, but vitally essential to, the practice of the Faith. Against this hideous background he set the calm and stately figure of his beloved friend Iglesias--seeing him no longer as the faithful comrade of more than half a lifetime, but as a foreign being, an unknown quant.i.ty, a worshipper of graven images, a partic.i.p.ant in blasphemous rites, a believer, in short, in just all that which sound, respectable, and G.o.dly British common sense cast forth, with scorn and contumely, close on four centuries back. He was frightened. His everyday, comfortable, jog-trot, little odd and end of a local parochial suburban middle-cla.s.s world was literally turned upside down and inside out.

"And however will the wife take it--however will she take it?" he mourned to himself. "To think we have been harbouring a Papist in disguise! I dare not contemplate her feelings. She will be upset. I must keep it from her as long as possible. And Serena, too, and Susan!

I don't know how I can face them. Females are so very eloquent when put out. Of course I have known there was something wrong for a long time past. I saw there was a change in him, and felt there was some cause of coldness; but it never entered my head it could be as bad as this. Oh! my poor, dear friend. Oh! my poor Dominic, perhaps I have been overattached to you and this comes as a judgment. It would be hard enough to have anything break up our friendship, but this folly, this dreadful doting apostasy--"

He walked on blindly along the sheltered path between the flower- borders, deaf to remonstrant nurses and scornful, beautiful babes clothed in spotless white.

"If anything must come between us I would rather it was a woman," he mourned, "ten thousand times rather, whoever and whatever she was, than this."

CHAPTER XXIV

It happened on the afternoon of that same day that Eliza Hart, in pursuance of her domestic avocations, had occasion to go into Mr.

Farge's room on the first floor to lay out a new coverlet on his bed.

When, as thus, compelled to enter the apartments of either of the gentlemen guests of the establishment it was her practice to leave the door half open, as a concession to propriety in the abstract and a testimony to her own discretion in the concrete. The handsome mahogany doors of Cedar Lodge, unhappily painted white by some vandal of a former inhabitant, being heavy were hung on a rising hinge. Hence, when half open, a s.p.a.ce of some three inches was left between the back of the door and the jamb, through which it was easy to get a good view of the hall or the landing un.o.bserved. Little Mr. Farge professed a warm predilection for gay colours, and Eliza had selected the new bedspread with an eye to this fact. It was of bright raspberry-red cotton twill, enriched with a broad printed border in a flowing design of lemon-yellow tulips and bottle-green leaves. The salesman, in exhibiting it to her, had described it as "very chaste and pleasing."

Eliza herself qualified it as "tasty"; and had just disposed it, much to her own satisfaction, upon the young man's bed, when her attention was arrested by the tones of an unknown feminine voice in the hall below. Shortly afterwards she heard Frederick, the valet's large footsteps hurtling upstairs at a double, followed by a prolonged and leisurely whispering of silken skirts. Here, clearly, was a matter into which, for the reputation of Cedar Lodge, it was desirable to look without delay. Eliza, therefore, moved to the near side of the door, and, through the three-inch aperture afforded by the rising hinge, raked the landing with a vigilant eye.

The door of Mr. Iglesias's sitting-room immediately opposite stood open. In the doorway Frederick indulged in explanatory gesticulation.

While, slowly ascending the last treads of the stairs, was a lady of unmistakable elegance, arrayed in a large black hat with drooping plumes to it, a sable cape--the price of which, Eliza felt a.s.sured, ran easily into three figures--and a black cloth dress in the cut of which she read the last word of contemporary fashion. Arrived at the stair-head the intruder stood still, calmly surveying her surroundings, presenting, as she turned her head, a pale face, very red lips, and eyes--so at least it appeared to the vigilant orbs of Eliza--quite immodestly large and l.u.s.trous, melancholy and somehow extremely impertinent, too. Then Mr. Iglesias emerged from his sitting-room, an expression upon his countenance which startled Eliza. She very certainly had never seen it before. For a moment the lady looked up at him, as though silently asking some question. Then she patted him lightly upon the back, and pa.s.sed into the sitting-room hand in hand with him, while Frederick with his best flourish closed the door.

"Well, of all the things!" cried Eliza, half aloud; and, oblivious both of discretion and of the new raspberry-red cotton twill coverlet, she backed, and sat, plump, upon the edge of the bed. Just then, as she a.s.serted in subsequently recounting this remarkable incident, you might have knocked her down with a feather.

"Of all the things!" she repeated, after an interval of breathless amazement. "And how long has this been going on, I should like to know? So that is the reason of a certain gentleman's iciness, and his stand-offish high-mightiness. Well, I never! And poor darling Peachie, so trustful and confiding all the time; not that she need fear comparison with anybody.--Bah! the serpent."

Nevertheless she was deeply impressed, and fell into a vein of furious speculation as to who this unlooked-for smart lady might be. Then, suddenly remembering the highly compromising nature of her own existing position sitting not only in the lively little Farge's bed- chamber, but actually upon his bed, she rose with embarra.s.sment and haste, and made her way downstairs to the offices--treading circ.u.mspectly in dread of creaking boards--to interview Frederick. But from that functionary she obtained scant information.

"Zee lady she ask for Mr. Iglesias. I tell her I go to find him. I put her in zee drawing-room."

"Quite right, Frederick,"--this encouragingly from Eliza.

"But she no stay zere. She come again out quick. She not any name, not any visiting card give; only write somezing, very fast, on a piece of paper and screw it togezzer. Zen she not wait till I return, but behind me upstairs chase."

So there was nothing for it, as the great Eliza perceived, but to retire to the drawing-room, and--Mrs. Porcher happened to be out--note the hour and, with the door discreetly half open, await the descent of the intruder from the floor above.

"I can just catch darling Peachie, too," she said to herself, "and draw her aside. To meet such a person unexpectedly, on the stairs or in the hall, would be enough to make her turn quite faint."

CHAPTER XXV

Poppy St. John laid her hands lightly on Mr. Iglesias' shoulders and smiled at him. She looked very young, yet very worn; and the corners of her mouth shook.

"If you were anybody else," she said, "I believe I should give you a kiss. But I am not going to, so don't be nervous, dear man. I'll be perfectly correct, I promise you--only I had to come. I have been good, absolutely tiptop beastly good, I tell you. I have washed the slate. It is as clean as a vacuum, as the inside of an exhausted receiver. And I feel as dull as empty s.p.a.ce before the creation got started."

Poppy shivered a little, putting one hand over her eyes, and resting her head with its great black hat and sweeping plumes against Mr.

Iglesias' chest. And Iglesias quietly put his arm round her, supporting her. The day had been full of experiences. This last, though of a notably different complexion to the rest, promised to be by no means the least searching and surprising. Iglesias steadied himself to take it quite calmly, in his stride; yet his jaw grew rigid and his face blanched in dread of that which might be coming.