CHAPTER XVII
The easterly wind blew strong and shattering, bleak and dreary, against the windows of the bedchamber at the back of the house. The complaint of the cedar tree, as the branches sawed upon one another, was long-drawn and loud. These sounds reached Iglesias in the sitting-room, where he sat, alone and unoccupied, before the fire. For more than a week now he had been confined to the house. He had set the door of communication between the two rooms open, so as to gain a greater sense of space and that he might take a little exercise by walking the whole length of them. The cry of the wind and the moan of the sawing branches was very comfortless, yet he made no effort to shut it out. To begin with, he was so weak that it was too much trouble to move. To go on with, the melancholy sounds were not ill-suited to his present humour. For a great depression was upon him, a weariness of spirit which might be felt. Out of doors London shivered, houses and sky and the expanse of Trimmer's Green, with its leafless trees and iron railings, livid, a greyness upon them as of fear. Dominic had no quarrel with this either. Indeed it gave him a certain bitter satisfaction, as offering a not inharmonious setting to his own thought.
Though not robust he was tough and wiry, so that illness of such a nature as to necessitate his remaining within doors was a new and trying experience. Crossing Hammersmith Bridge on the 'bustop ten days previously, the chill of the river had struck through him. Yet this, in all reasonable probability, would merely have resulted in passing physical discomfort, but for the moral and spiritual hurt immediately preceding it. How far the mind has power to cure the body is still an open question. But that the mind can actively predispose the body to sickness is indubitable. To realise and analyse, in their several bearings, the causes and consequences of that same moral hurt Iglesias' pride and loyalty alike refused. In respect of them he set his jaw and sternly averted his eyes. Yet, though the will may be steady to resist and to abstain, the tides of feeling ebb and flow, contemptuous of control as those of some unquiet sea. They defy volition, notably in illness when vitality is low. Refuse as he might to go behind the fact, it remained indisputable that the Lady of the Windswept Dust had given him his dismissal. Out of his daily life a joy had gone, a constant object of thought and interest. Out of his heart a living presence had gone, leaving a void more harsh than death. And all this had happened in a connection peculiarly painful and distasteful to him; so that it was as though a foul miasma had arisen, and, drifting across the face of his fair friendship, distorted its proportions, rendering all his memories of it suspect. Further, in this discrediting of friendship his hope of the discovery of that language of the soul which can alone effect a true adjustment between the exterior and interior life had suffered violent eclipse. He had been thrown back into the prison-house of the obvious and the material. The world had lost its poetry, had grown narrow, sordid, dim, and gross. His own life had grown more than ever barren of opportunity and inept. In short, Dominic Iglesias had lost sight of the far horizon which is touched by the glory of the Uncreated Light; and, so doing, dwelt in outer darkness once again, infinitely desolate.
On the afternoon in question he had reached the nadir of disillusion and distrust. He leaned back in the red-covered chair, his shapely hands lying, palms downward, along the two arms of it, his vision of the room and its familiar contents blurred by unshed tears. It was an hour of supreme discouragement.
"Nothing is left," he said, half aloud, "nothing. The future is as blank as the present. If this is to grow old, then indeed those whom the gods love have need enough to die young."
For a space he listened to the shattering wind as it cried in the window-sashes, to the branches of the cedar sawing upon one another and moaning as in self-inflicted pain. Newsboys were calling early specials. The coarse cockney voices, strangled by the easterly blast, met and crossed one another, died away in a side street, to emerge again and again encounter. Such words as were distinguishable seemed of sinister import, agitating to the imagination. Then de Courcy Smyth's shuffling footsteps crossed the floor of the room overhead. The wire-wove mattress of his bed creaked as he sat on the edge of it, kicking off his slippers and putting on walking boots, as might be gathered from floppings followed by an equally nerveless but heavier tread. A door opened, closed, and the footsteps descended the stairs. On the landing without they paused for an appreciable time; but, to Mr. Iglesias's great relief, deciding against attempt of entry, continued their cheerless progress down to the hall below. Yet, just now Iglesias could have found it in his heart to envy the man, notwithstanding his unsavouriness of attitude and aspect. For in him ambition still stirred. He had still definite work to do, and the hope of eventual fame to support him during the doing of it; had the triumph of the theatre, the applause of an audience in the white heat of enthusiasm to dream of and strive after.
"But, for me, nothing," Iglesias repeated, "whether vital as of those far-away southern battle-fields, or fictitious and close at hand as of the stage. Not even the sting of poverty to whet appetite and give an edge to bodily hunger. Nothing, either of fear or of hope. The measure of my obscurity is the measure of my immunity from change of fortune, bad or good. I am worthless even as food for powder. Danger herself will have none of me, and passes me by."
With that he raised his hands and let them drop despairingly along the arms of the chair again, while the unbidden tears overflowed. For a minute or more he remained thus, weeping silently with bowed head. Then, a movement of self-contempt taking him, he regained his calm, sat upright, brushing away the tears.
And it was as though, in thus regaining a clearer physical vision, he regained a clearer mental vision likewise. Purpose asserted itself as against mere blind acquiescence. Iglesias looked up, demanding as of right some measure of consolation, some object promising help. So doing, his eyes sought a certain carven oak panel set in an ebony frame. From his earliest childhood he remembered it, for it had hung in his mother's bedchamber; and in those far-away years, while she still had sufficient force to disregard opposition and make an open practice of prayer, she had kneeled before it when engaged in her devotions. Waking at night—when as a baby-child, during his father's long absences, he slept in her room—Dominic had often seen the delicate kneeling figure, wrapped in some loose-flowing garment, the hands outstretched in supplication. Even then, in the first push of conscious intelligence, the carven picture had spoken to him as something masterful, for all its rigidity and sadness, and very strong to help. It had given him a sense of protection and security, so that his little soul was satisfied; and he could go to sleep again in peace, sure that his mother was in safe keeping while—as he said—she "talked to it." In the long interval which had elapsed since then he had lost touch with the spirit of it, though preserving it as among the most cherished of his family relics. His appreciation of it had become aesthetic rather than religious. But now, as it hung on the dimly white wall above his writing-table on the window side of the fireplace, the dreary London afternoon light took the surface of it, bringing all the details of the scene into prominence. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the old power declared itself. The picture came alive as to the intention and meaning of it. It spoke to him once again, and that with no uncertain voice.
Three tall narrow crosses uplifted against a cloudless sky. Below, a multitude of men, women, and horses, carved in varying degrees of relief. Some starting into bold definiteness, some barely indicated and as though imprisoned in the thickness of the wood; but all grave, energetic, and, whether inspired by compassion or by mockery, fierce. These grouped around a great web of linen—upheld by some of them at the four corners, hammock-wise, high at the head, low at the foot—wherein lay the corpse of a man in the very flower of his age, of heroic proportions, spare yet muscular, long and finely angular of limb, the articulations notably slender, the head borne proudly though bent, the features severely beautiful, the whole virile, indomitable even in the physical abjection of death.
In this Spanish presentment of the closing act of the Divine Tragedy the sensuous pagan element, which mars too many otherwise admirable works of religious art, was absent. Its appeal was to the intellect rather than to the emotions, inculcating effort rather than inviting any sentimental passion of pity. Its message was that of conquest, of iron self-mastery and self-restraint. This was bracing and courage-begetting even when viewed from the exclusively artistic standpoint. But now not merely the presentment of the event held Iglesias' attention, but the event presented, the thing in itself. His heart and intelligence grasped the meaning of it, not only as a matter of supreme historic interest in view of its astonishing influence upon human development during the last two thousand years; but as an ever-present reality, as an exposition of the Absolute, of that which everlastingly has been, and everlastingly will be, and hence of incalculable and immediate importance to himself. It spoke to him of no vague and general truth; but of a truth intimate and individual, coming to him as the call to enter upon a personal inheritance. Of obedience to the dictates of natural religion, and faithful practice of the pieties of it, Dominic Iglesias had, all his life, been a remarkable if unconscious exponent. But this awakening of the spirit to the actualities of supernatural religion, this crossing of that dark immensity of space which appears to interpose between Almighty God and the mind of man, was new to him. He had sought a language of the soul which might effect an adjustment between the exterior and interior life. Here, in the Word made Flesh, with reverent amazement he found it. He had sought it through the instrumentality of the things of time and sense; and they, though full with promise, had proved illusory. He had fixed his hope on relation to the creature. But here, all the while, close beside him, waiting till the scales should fall from his eyes and he should see and understand, had stood the Creator. Fair, very fair—while it lasted—was human friendship. But here, had he but strength and daring to meet it, was a friendship infinitely fairer, immutable, eternal—namely, the friendship of Almighty God.
The easterly wind still cried in the window-sashes, harsh and shattering. The branches of the exiled cedar tree sawed upon one another, uttering their long-drawn complaint. The voices of the newsboys, hoarse and raucous, shouting their sinister message, still came and went. The livid light of the winter afternoon grew more dreary as it sank into, and was absorbed by, the deepening dusk. But to Dominic Iglesias these things had ceased to matter. Dazzled, enchanted, confounded, alike by the magnitude and the simplicity of his discovery, he remained gazing at the carven panel; gazing through and beyond it to that of which it was the medium and symbol, gazing, clear-eyed and fearlessly, away to the far horizon radiant with the surpassing glory of the Uncreated Light.