The Tower of Oblivion Part 56

"And then?"

"I can't think beyond that, sir."

"But there will be something beyond that."

He was silent while the Light revolved twice, thrice, then:

"Et revivre pour t'adorer ... like a soft warm sun even in the night,"

he breathed scarcely audibly. "You can't call it sleeping. Something blessed that you can't see is going on behind it all the time. Something seems to be breathing. That's what happens in the night now. It isn't sleeping; you're too happy to want to go to sleep. Then she smiles. Not like in the toyshop. She didn't smile in the toyshop; that was a different kind of look altogether. She smiled yesterday when we were having tea, but you weren't looking. And twice to-day--twice.... At first I was afraid my painting was going to excite me a bit, upset me.

Once or twice it did a little. I didn't want to talk about it much this afternoon for fear of it upsetting me. But everything calms down when she looks and smiles. It's just her being there. There isn't any gla.s.s at all; the gla.s.s is between us two and everybody else in the world.

Painting's perfectly safe with her by me--perfectly safe.... But nothing's safe without. I shall slip again without her now. I felt myself even begin to slip that time you said she was going away. It was frightening.... Don't ask me to try the experiment, sir; it's so horribly risky; but if they were to spring it on me that she _was_ going away I know quite well what would happen. It would be like before; I should have to pack up my traps and disappear again. And that time it would be the end.... But as long as I'm with her it's all clear ahead--the new way--the way I always tried to find and always missed--il est venu le jour----"

He was hardly speaking to me. Little as I could see of his face, I could divine what pa.s.sed there. After that recent violence, this almost dumb meekness and awaiting my judgment. And because he was not speaking to me, but was communing with his own solitary soul as gravely as he had bent his knee before That which rose above us into the night, I knew that I must end by believing him. At a word I could have sent her away.

He had offered to put himself to the test of her departure. That he might be believed he had even offered to risk once more that hideous hiatus in his life.

But it was not demonstration that swayed me to my irrevocable act. It was rather that transcending love that he himself had invoked. Love and pity lest this my son should once more be cast to the wolves of pain welled up like a sudden fountain in my heart. Nay, not from my own poor heart did it well, but from That above us that showed its dim crowned head and outspread arms every four seconds, every eleven seconds, four times a minute, cloaked itself in the night again, and again softly reappeared with the sweep of the occulted Light--from That I think my pity descended. No thought for the morrow had that Original taken, no care of father or mother or friend, but only for the weak and the outcasts of the world. Who was outcast if this grave and destiny-ridden young figure before me was not? I had stood before him waiting for him to strike me down; now in his patience and submission he struck me down.

I could leave the Airds. I could turn my back on them for ever. This dark-bloused lad was my loved son, who mutely implored me to be given his chance. Were the Airds to die I should have to part from them.

Death, that comes unannounced at any moment, parts us from all our friends. My portrait need never hang in the Lyonnesse Club to remind Madge Aird that she had once had a friend who had betrayed her. I need not even return to England. So Derry might but establish himself, what did it matter though I wandered? I had no love, n.o.body had a love for me, such as that that made his days and nights softly radiant. In a few years I should be gone. But he would be once more in the glory of his prime, living a life of my giving. In him would be my resurrection. To help him over this dead point the rest of my life was at his service.

His prayer should be answered.

But not without a stipulation. When all is said one has to be practical. Should she after all fail to lead him by the hand forward again into those fair and untrodden fields of life, all was rescinded.

He must report progress. No step must be taken without my knowledge. One does not meditate a treason against one's friends quite so light-heartedly as all that. Nor need he yet be told what I had in my mind. I turned to him.

"I shall go back now," I said.

He did not speak.

"But I shall do nothing to-night. In fact I won't do anything till I've seen you again."

He did not thank me in words.

"But the understanding is that you do nothing either. Is that agreed?"

"I promise that, sir."

"Then that's all. I'm very tired. I think I want to sleep."

"Won't you lean on my shoulder, sir?"

"Perhaps I will----"

Only to touch her willing hand--only to carry her letter in his breast--only to feel that in the unison of their two hearts the rest of the world might be lost in oblivion----

VI

My reason for not telling him of my decision was that I did not wish him to have the uneasiness of knowing that he was responsible for it. Nor am I apologising for the mood in which I had made my choice. I had done so, however, without very much regard for necessary and practical details.

These it was that I began to turn over in my mind as, racked and restless, I lay in my bed that night.

And first of all I began to realise that my choice involved me straight away in that very web of sophistry and dissimulation that I had wished to avoid. I had imagined on the spur of the moment that by walking out of the Airds' house with the most plausible explanation I could find, or for that matter none at all, I should be observing some sort of a decency to the roof that had so hospitably sheltered me. But when I came to look at it again!... Good G.o.d, what sort of decency was that? To begin with, when you walk away from somewhere you walk to somewhere, and where was I to walk to? Away from Dinard altogether? That would be to walk away from Derry. Take him away with me? That would be to take him away from Jennie and all hope. Move to an hotel? I should be running into my late friends every hour, at every turn.

In a word, what I was contemplating was not war on the Airds, nor even a hypocritical neutrality. It was a vile a.s.sa.s.sination. And suddenly I saw, and with a most singular clearness, that my only way out, the only possible and honourable course, was not to leave the Airds and Dinard at all, but to leave the earth altogether. Believe me, who know, that that in the end is what contact with such a man as Derwent Rose amounts to.

But I cannot say that suicide, sentimental, religious or of whatever kind, has ever strongly attracted me. There was a much, much simpler way out. Derry knew nothing of what had pa.s.sed through my mind while Frehel's sweeping beam had conjured up that pallid Christ out of the darkness. I had not told him that I was prepared to sacrifice myself for him. All that he had been promised was a respite on terms till to-morrow.

A flood of mean grat.i.tude swept over me that I had told him no more. I have never known a viler or more shameful ease than that that possessed me when it became plain that I could go back on him and he be none the wiser. I am not sure that my recreant lips had not the impudence to thank G.o.d that only I knew the depth of my cowardice and indecision.

For my plan was utterly impossible of execution. It was as impossible to give him his chance as I had found it to refuse it. Racked and restless I tossed. I even imagine I had a slight touch of delirium, for fantastic thoughts and images seemed to dance and interweave and pop up and disappear again before me. I saw Derry back in Cambridge Circus again, and his black oak furniture played the most unamusing tricks. Sometimes his table would be a litter of newspapers and clothing and brown paper, with an overturned teacup and the two halves of a torn novel lying on the top; then it would magically clear itself, and Jennie would be standing by it, a sort of mental extension of Jennie, whose face, however, I did not see. His catalogued shelves of books would disappear, and there would be an easel in the middle of the room, and canvases round the walls, and these would change to the rugs and lacquer of Julia Oliphant's little recess.... Then the whole of Cambridge would slide obliquely away, and I would see Jennie's back as she mounted the ladder of a South Kensington Mews. Then he would appear from nowhere and take her in his arms, and he had a golden beard, and the next moment was riding in a hansom with nothing of Jennie visible but her slipper....

Julia Oliphant's slipper in the Piccadilly, Peggy and her garters, lots of slippers, Jennie's dancing slippers, Jennie in the Dinard Bazaar, Jennie at the guichet slipping a note into his hand. The ticking of my watch on the table annoyed me, but I did not get up, and presently I had ceased to hear it. Then it came again, regularly, irregularly, once every four seconds, once every eleven seconds, tick-tick, darkness and the Light, tick-tick, darkness and the Light....

So I tossed, waking every now and then with a start to tell myself that something must be done--where nothing was possible to be done.

And so, like Peter, I was prepared to deny him ere the c.o.c.k crew.

I had, in fact, a touch of fever. The next morning I managed to dress for dejeuner, but when I entered the salon I must needs choose that moment to give a little lurch and stagger. Alec caught me.

"Here, what's all this about?" he said.

"It's all right."

He gave me a quick look. "It isn't all right. You'd better come upstairs to bed again."

So I was undressed, and back into bed I was put, my protests notwithstanding.

The affection with which I was treated certainly helped me very little in my resolution to glide like a snake noiselessly out of this house, leaving my poison behind me. Madge was in and out the whole of the afternoon, a perfect angel of attention and comfort; Alec hunted out an English doctor--I am sure he believed that a French one would subtly and diabolically have made away with me. I was told that I must stay in bed for some days. I demurred, but I really doubt whether I could have got up.

So they turned Ker Annic upside down for me. To leave father and mother and friends is a thing you have to do quickly and with immediate acceptance of the consequences, or not to do at all. You mustn't begin to let people be kind to you.

And no less than in material things were they solicitous to keep from me anything that might worry me. Madge laughed away my apologies for the havoc I made of her engagements, Alec vowed that it was a top-hole way of spending a holiday to sit at my open window, pretending he was smoking outside, while the gentle summer breeze that stirred the curtains blew it all in again. I think his crowning kindness was to get in a barber daily to shave me. Were I to grow a beard I fear it would not be a golden one.

And even Jennie visited me once or twice, which is very much indeed from seventeen who has never known a headache to one who has known more than he cares to think about.

On Jennie's first two visits to me other people were in and out of the room; but on the third occasion I was alone. It was mid-afternoon, and Madge and Alec, I knew, had gone out to pay a call. They had left me everything that I was likely to need until their return, and I had imagined the house to be empty. But Jennie tapped and entered, and asked me how I was. Then she crossed over and stood by the window, where the sun touched the gold of her hair and showed the shadow of her arms within her light sleeves.

"Nothing very amusing to do this afternoon, Jennie?" I asked from my pillow.

"No, only pottering about," she replied.

"Then won't you come and have tea with me presently?"

"I'll order it now if you like."

"Do, and then come back and sit with me unless it bores you."

She went out, and presently returned. She was not particularly good about a sick-room. She gave a superfluous touch to things here and there, and then bent over me and shook my pillow with a gesture that somehow reminded me of that quick little run to her mother's side at the tramway terminus at St Briac.

"Would you like me to read to you?" she asked.