I stared at him. “See here, Arthur,” I objected. “I’m not a Cath. And I don’t know a thing—at least it’s all dead in me and forgotten—about poetry or classics or your gods and pan—pantheism—in spite of grandfather——”
His face turned like a dream face.
“Hush!” he said quickly. “Don’t mention him. There’s a bit of him in you as well as in me, and it was here, you know, he wrote——”
I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. A creep came over me. I remembered that this ancestor of ours lived for years in the isolation of some Swiss forest where he claimed—he used that setting for his writing—he had found the exiled gods, their ghosts, their beauty, their eternal essences—or something astonishing of that sort. I had clean forgotten it till this moment. It all rushed back upon me, a memory of my boyhood.
And, as I say, a creep came over me—something as near to awe as ever could be. The sunshine on that field of yellow daisies and blue forget-me-nots turned pale. That warm valley wind had a touch of snow in it. And, ashamed and frightened of my baby mood, I looked at Arthur, meaning to choke him off with all this rubbish—and then saw something in his eyes that scared me stiff.
I admit it. What’s the use? There was an expression on his fine big face that made my blood go curdled. I got cold feet right there. It mastered me. In him, behind him, near him—blest if I know which, through him probably—came an enormous thing that turned me insignificant. It downed me utterly.
It was over in a second, the flash of a wing. I recovered instantly. No mere boy should come these muzzy tricks on me, scholar or no scholar. For the change in me was on the increase, and I shrank.
“See here, Arthur,” I said plainly once again, “I don’t know what your game is, but—there’s something queer up here I don’t quite get at. I’m only a business man, with classics and poetry all gone dry in me twenty years ago and more——”
He looked at me so strangely that I stopped, confused.
“But, Uncle Jim,” he said as quietly as though we talked tobacco brands, “you needn’t be alarmed. It’s natural you should feel the place. You and I belong to it. We’ve both got him in us. You’re just as proud of him as I am, only in a different way.” And then he added, with a touch of disappointment: “I thought you’d like it. You weren’t afraid last night. You felt the beauty then.”