CHAPTER XXIII
Good George Lovegrove wandered solitary in Kensington Gardens. He had chosen the lower path running parallel with Kensington Gore, which leads, between flowerborders and thickset belts of shrubbery, from the Broad Walk to the railings enclosing the open space around the Albert Memorial. This path, being sheltered and furnished with many green garden seats, is specially nurse and baby haunted, and it was to see the babies, whether sturdily on foot or seated in their little carriages, that George Lovegrove had come hither, being sad. Thrushes sang lustily from the treetops. The flowerborders grew resplendent with polyanthus, crocus yellow, purple, and white, with early daffodils, and the heaven blue of scilla sibirica. Above, here and there a froth of almond or cherry blossom overspread the dark twigs and branches, while a ruddiness of burgeoning buds flushed the great elms. But babies of position, looking like tiny pink-faced polar bears, still wore their long leggings and white furs, the March wind being treacherous. They galloped, trumpeting, the clean air and merry sunshine going to their heads in the most inebriating fashion. It was early, moreover, so that they were full of the energy of a good night's sleep, of breakfast, and of comfortable nursery warmth. And George Lovegrove stepped among them carefully, watching their gambols moist-eyed, nervously anxious lest his quaintly solid figure should obstruct the erratic progress of toy-horse, or hoop, or ball. He craved for notice, for even the veriest scrap of friendly recognition, yet was too diffident to attempt any direct intercourse with these delectable small personages, who, on their part, were royally indifferent to his existence so long as he did not get in their way. This he clearly perceived, yet for it bore them no ill-will, preferring, as does every truly devout lover, to worship the beloved from a respectful distance rather than not worship at all.
And it was thus, even as a large and dusky elephant picking its way very gently through a flock of skippeting and lively lambs, that Mr. Iglesias, entering the sheltered walk from the far end, first caught sight of him. To Dominic, it must be admitted, babies, song-birds, burgeoning buds and blossoms, alike presented themselves as but elements in the setting of the outward scene—a scene sweet enough had one leisure to contemplate it, touched by the genial vernal influence, witness to nature's undying youth. But his appreciation of that sweetness was just now cursory and indirect. His thought was absorbed and eager, penetrated by apprehension of matters lying above and beyond the range of ordinary human speech. For he was in that exalted interval of a many hours' fast when the spiritual intelligence is wholly alive and awake, the body becoming but the vesture of the soul—a vesture without impediment or weight, a beautifully negligible quantity in the general scheme of existence. Later reaction sets in. The claims of the body become dominant; and the exalted moment is too often paid for sorrowfully enough in sluggish brain and irritated nerves. Dominic, however, had not reached that stage of the tragi-comedy of the marriage of flesh and spirit. He was happy, with the white unearthly happiness of those who have been admitted to the Sacred Mysteries. And it was not without a sense of shock, as of rough descent to common things, of pity and of regret, that he recognised good George Lovegrove cruising thus, elephantine, among the roystering babes. Then Iglesias checked himself sternly. To humble themselves, remembering their own great unworthiness, to come down from the Mount of Transfiguration to the dwellers in the plain, and be gentle and human towards them—this surely is the primary duty of those who have assisted at the Divine Sacrament? And so Iglesias went forward and hailed his old school-fellow in all tenderness and friendship, causing the latter to raise his eyes from pathetic contemplation of those charming but wholly self-absorbed small human animals, and look up.
"Dominic!" he cried. "Well, to be sure, you do surprise me. Who would have expected to meet you out at this hour of the morning? I do congratulate myself. I am pleased," he said. His honest face beamed, his fresh colour deepened. As a girl at the unlooked-for advent of her lover, he grew confused and shy. And Iglesias warmed towards him. Whimsical in appearance, simple-minded, not greatly skilled in any sort of learning, yet he had a heart of gold—about that there could be no manner of doubt.
"Turn back then, and let us walk together," Iglesias said affectionately. "It is a long while since we have had a quiet talk—that is, of course, if you have no particular business which calls you to town."
"I have no business of any description," he answered. "And between ourselves, Dominic, since I lost my seat on the borough council, I have had too much time on my hands, I think. It is beginning to be quite a trouble with me."
"Is life too softly padded, too dead-level easy and comfortable?" Iglesias inquired. "Are you beginning to quarrel a little with your blessings?"
George Lovegrove became very serious.
"Yes," he said, "I am afraid you are right. As usual you have laid your finger on the spot. I do reproach myself for unthankfulness often. I know I have a good home, and everything decent and respectable about me; more so, indeed, than a man in my position has any right to expect. And yet I regret the old days in the city, Dominic, that I do. I should enjoy to be back at my old desk at the bank—just the little snap of anxiety in the morning as to whether one would catch the 'bus; the long ride through the streets with one's morning paper; the turning out with the other clerks—good fellows all of them, on the whole, were they not?—to get a snack of lunch. And then the coming home at night, with some trifling present or dainty to please the wife; and a look round the greenhouse and garden afterwards in your lounge suit; and hearing and retailing all the day's news, and talking of the good time coming when you would retire and be quite the independent gentleman; and the half-day on Saturday, too, taking some nice little outing to Richmond or Kew, or an exhibition or something of the sort, and then the Sunday's rest."
He hesitated and sighed, looking wistfully at the white-clad babies.
"If one had two or three of those little people of one's own it might be very different—though I would never breathe a word of such a thought to the wife. Females are so easily upset; and if it raises regrets in us men, it must be much more trying for them, poor things, to be childless. But where was I? Yes, well now the good time has come—and I feel a criminal in saying so, but it appears to me to be growing stale already, Dominic. It was better in anticipation than in fact. I am an ungrateful fellow, that I am, I know it; but sometimes I am inclined to ask myself whether all the things we set such fond hopes on are not like that."
"No, not all," Iglesias answered, with a certain subdued enthusiasm. "There are things—a few—which never grow stale. One may build on them as on a foundation of rock. If they ever seem to fail us, to be shaken and overthrown, it is an evil delusion, and the cause lies not in them but in ourselves. It is we who fail, who are shaken and overthrown through palsied will and feebleness of faith. They remain forever inviolate."
"I suppose so," the other man said timidly. He was unused to such vehemence of assertion on the part of his friend. He wondered to what it could refer. His thought, carrying back to the evening at the theatre, played around visions of distinguished amours. Then he steadied himself to heroic resolve.
"I suppose it is," he repeated, "and that makes my conduct appear all the more discreditable to me. My circumstances are too comfortable and easy. It is just that. And so I take to fretting over trifles and seeing slights and unkindness where none were intended." He looked up at Iglesias, his squinting eyes full of apology and admiration. "Yes, I am sadly poor-spirited and I have no excuse. I have been nursing a sense of injury towards those to whom I have most occasion for gratitude—the wife and you. Dominic, believe me I am heartily ashamed of myself."
"Come, come," Iglesias answered, brought very much back to earth, yet touched and softened. "My dear friend, you of all men have small cause for self-reproach. In every relation of life—and our knowledge of one another dates back to early youth—I have found you perfect in loyalty and unselfish kindness."
George Lovegrove walked on for a moment in silence. He had to clear his throat once or twice before he could command his voice.
"Praise from you is very encouraging," he managed to say at last. "But I am afraid I do not deserve it. I have felt mortified lately sometimes, and I am afraid envious. I—but after your last words I am more than ever ashamed to own it—I have fancied that you were becoming distant and that an estrangement was growing up between us. Of course I have always understood, though we happened to be school-fellows and in the same employment afterward, that your position and mine were different. And I want you to know that I would never be a clog on you, Dominic"—he spoke with an admirably simple dignity—"believe me, I never would be that. Lately I have been troubled by the thought that I had extracted a promise from you to remain at Trimmer's Green. Now I beg of you most earnestly not to let that promise, given in a moment of generous indulgence, weigh with you in the slightest, if circumstances have arisen which point at your residing in a more fashionable part of the town."
"But why should I want to go to a more fashionable part of London?" Iglesias asked, smiling.
"Well, you see," the other returned, his face growing furiously red, "it came to my knowledge, unexpectedly, that you have acquaintances in quite another walk of life to ours—the wife's and mine, I mean. And it would pain me deeply, very deeply, Dominic, that any promise given to me, regarding your place of residence, should stand between you and mixing as freely with those acquaintances as you might otherwise do."
They had come to the place where the sheltered pathway is crossed by the Broad Walk—the upward trend of which showed blond, in the sunshine, against the brilliant green of the grass and the dark boles of the great trees bordering it. Here Iglesias paused. He was not altogether pleased.
"I do not quite follow you," he said coldly. Then looking at the guileless and faithful being beside him, he softened once more. Was it not only more just, but more honourable, to treat this matter with candour? "You are alluding to the lady who was good enough to send for me the night you and Miss Lovegrove went with me to the play?"
"Yes," the excellent George assented in a strangled voice. He wanted to know badly. He was agonised by fear of having committed an indiscretion offensive to his idol.
"Set your mind quite at rest on that point then, my dear friend. Her world is not my world and never will be. In it I should be very much out of place."
Iglesias moved forward again, crossing the Broad Walk and making towards the small iron gate, at the lower corner of the Gardens, which opens on to Kensington High Street. But he walked slowly, becoming conscious that he grew tired and spent. The glory of the spirit dominant was departing, the tyranny of the body dominant beginning to reassert itself. His features contracted slightly. He felt unreasoningly sad.
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 circumscribed 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 Mass," 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 Mass," 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 balls, 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-superstitious, terror fostered by the accumulated ignorance which generations of Protestant forefathers have bequeathed to the English middle-class, 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 "spacious 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, illustrated 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 quantity, a worshipper of graven images, a participant in blasphemous rites, a believer, in short, in just all that which sound, respectable, and godly 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-class 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."