“The very fact that you’re alive makes her hold the tighter. No, you can’t save her in that way. I wish you could.”
X
RAINGER had had his insight, but, outwardly, in the year that followed, Gavan’s life was one of peace, of achieved escape.
The world soon ceased to pull at him, to plead or protest. With a kindly shrug of the shoulders the larger life passed him by as one more proved ineffectual. The little circle that clung about him, as the flotsam and jetsam of a river drift from the hurrying current around the stability and stillness of a green islet, was, in the main, composed of the defeated or the indifferent. One or two cynical fighters moored their boats, for a week-end, at his tranquil shores, and the powerful old statesman who believed nothing, hoped nothing, felt very little, and who, behind his show-life of patriotic and hard-working nobleman, smiled patiently at the whole foolish comedy, was his most intimate companion. To the world at large, Lord Taunton was the witty Tory, the devoted churchman, the wise upholder of all the hard-won props of civilization; to Gavan, he was the skeptical and pessimistic metaphysician; together they watched the wheels go round.
Mayburn came down once or twice to see his poor, queer, dear old Palairet, and in London boasted much of the experience. “He’s too, too wonderful,” he said. “He has achieved a most delicate, recondite harmony. One never heard anything just like it before, and can’t, for the life of one, tell just what the notes are. Effort, constant effort, amidst constant quiet and austerity. Work is his passion, and yet never was any creature so passionless. He’s like a rower, rowing easily, indefatigably, down a long river, among lilies, while he looks up at the sky.”
But Mayburn felt the quiet and austerity a little disturbing. He didn’t, after all, come to look at quiet and austerity unless some one were there to hear him talk about them; and his host, all affability, never seemed quite there.
So a year, more than a year, went by.
It was on an early spring morning that Gavan found on his breakfast-table a letter written in a faltering hand,—a hand that faltered with the weeping that shook it,—Miss Barbara’s old, faint hand.
He read, at first, hardly comprehending.