Sadness fell between them sitting there, and presently monsieur de Maubert said, showing that he felt it, “Well, the sun is setting; I will go in. You are sorry for me and I am sorry for you.—Do we terminate our discussion in a mutual sympathy?”
He had risen from his chair with a rather porpoise-like roll of his stout white body and stood, complete, assured, benevolent, looking down at Giles; and Giles wondered, looking up at him, whether the price one paid for such completeness was just that blindness.
“I suppose there is sympathy,” he vaguely murmured. “I’m afraid it’s true, though. I think you quite as wrong as you think me.”
“Ah, when you are as old as I am,” said monsieur de Maubert, unperturbed, “you will think differently. You will by then, assuredly, intelligent as you are, have learned to make a better use of your time. You will have learned to round out your life by a richer experience.”
Giles, too, had risen, and he could almost have laughed as he listened; it struck him as so comic, with its sadness, that the traditional rôles of youth and age should be thus reversed. “You will have learned,” monsieur de Maubert was going on, “to accept the full gamut of our human nature. There remains nothing, nothing, for the anchorite in his desert—let me assure you of it—but the handful of sand his dying hand clutches at. He has had, you will say, his mirage with which to console himself. That is a sorry consolation at the end. Accept reality, my young friend. Accept the full gamut. Neglect none of the strings of your violin. It is broken all too soon. And what more sad than to have stopped your ears against its sweetest melody?”
“What, indeed?” said Giles. There was hardly irony in his voice. It was contemplative rather. And smiling at monsieur de Maubert as they stood there in the sunset, he added: “We want different things.” That simile of the unheard melody summed it up.
CHAPTER VIII
It was strange to meet them all again that evening, so unchanged to their own consciousness, so changed to his. Strange to find them still so charming and so to shrink from their charm. They came laughing up the steps of the verandah where he still sat, and he wondered if they felt in his voice and look, as he greeted them, any difference.
“Ah, it was an excellent set,” André de Valenbois said, laying down his racquet and seating himself next to Giles. “Where did you disappear to, mon ami? We looked, and you were in the chalet, and when we looked again, you were gone.”
“I felt I’d like a walk. I went up the hill behind the chalet,” said Giles. “The country is lovely up there.”