Lord Alistair stood on the deck of a Channel steamer and watched the coast of England melt into the night.
His mood was burthened with that indignant melancholy which swelled the heart of Byron and of Whistler, and many another exile whom the builders of the Raj have rejected from their midst. In the Tate Gallery hangs a painting which he had often gazed upon, a symbolic masterpiece of Watts’. It represents hard-heartedness sitting crowned with gold and robed in scarlet on the throne of the world. The painter has called his figure “Mammon”; it came before Alistair just then as the image of England—the England that stones her prophets and worships her swindlers; the England that made Burns a gauger and one Perceval Prime Minister; that chained the dying Napoleon on an ocean rock, and rejected the last prayer of Nelson; England, with her shop-keeper’s conscience, where art is a sin and generosity a crime.
A sense of exultation and relief accompanied his thoughts. He was escaping from the Puritan prison against whose bars his spirit had so often bruised its wings. In the obtuse self-satisfaction, in the unctuous mercy, of its keepers he had felt something more merciless than in all the recorded cruelties of furious saints and frantic Emperors. Not the snow-peaks of Switzerland, he told himself, not the Shakespearean cadences of Venice, nor Rome with her memories and marbles, afforded that zest to wandering which greets us like a scent on foreign soil. It was the sense of freedom from that chain of custom and convention which we forge upon ourselves. The Mediterranean filled her coasts with pleasure cities which were cities of refuge from the middle class. The Niagara of gold that poured from England was the price the English tradesman pays for his vindictive respectability. It was the tax on spite.
A moist wind thick with delicious sea-smells, that mounted in the brain like wine, lifted him out of his vexed meditation as the steamer drew clear of the tangled lights of Spithead and came out on the wide moonlit pavement of the sea. His mother joined him on the deck, and they sat and watched the broad moon sail aloft like a luminous balloon scattering glory.
“I should like it to be like this always,” Alistair sighed in ecstasy.
A sense of utter peace had fallen on his spirit, worn out with striving. The molten orb, lifting beyond the shadow of the earth, seemed to drag his soul upward as a spar is sucked in the wake of a great ship. He looked up and longed after that visible Elysium, that floating Island of the Blest on which the happy dead voyaged in light for ever across a sea buoyed with stars. That ship of souls, on what far coasts did it touch? within what magic roadsteads anchor? What wondrous cities went forth to greet the mariners of that immortal Odyssey?
The yearnings of a thousand generations who have spelled in the heavens for some divine boding of the fates of men; the mystic soundings of devout astronomers in temple labyrinths beside old Nile; the vision conned upon the starlit terraces of Babylonian towers—all these forgotten intimations from his pre-natal life surged in upon him in waves of deep emotion, and floated his consciousness from its moorings among the things of every day.
Caroline sat beside her son and did not break the silence. She, too, was happy. Her prayers had been granted; the prodigal had found his way home. Within the compass of her simple mind there was room for only one ending to the story. Conversion would follow on repentance, and a happy marriage would insure a regular and fortunate career.
Her agitated joy over his return to Colonsay House had moved Alistair, if not to repentance, to a wish that he could change his nature in accordance with the life his mother wanted him to lead. In the first moments of united tenderness he even persuaded himself that this might be so. He was wearied and disheartened by his warfare with society, and he hoped that the truce might ripen into a peace.
The Duke of Trent’s reception of his brother had been courteous, if not very cordial. He bade him welcome to the house, and on the following evening informed him in their mother’s presence that the family solicitor had taken charge of his affairs.