“That defines it well enough.”
“Well, you serve my purpose,” said Eppie, “and that is to have you for my friend.”
She seemed in this parting to have effaced all memory of glamour, but Gavan knew that the deeper one was with him.
It was with him, even while, in the long journey South, he was able to unwrap film after film of the mirage from its central core of reality, to see Eppie, in all her loveliness, in all her noblest aspects, as a sort of incarnation of the world, the flesh, and the devil. He could laugh over the grotesque analogy; it proved to him how far from life he was when its symbol could show in such unflattering terms, and yet it hurt him that he could find it in himself so to symbolize her. It was just because she was so lovely, so noble, that he must—he must—. For, under all, was the wrench that would take time to stop aching.
X
APTAIN PALAIRET had gone to pieces and was now as unpleasant an object as for years he had been a pleasant one.
Gavan’s atrophied selfishness felt only a slight shrinking from the revolting aspects of dissolution, and his father’s condition rather interested him. The captain’s childish clinging to his son was like an animal instinct suddenly asserting itself, an almost vegetable instinct, so little more than mere instinct was it. It affected Gavan much as the suddenly contracting tentacles of a sea-anemone upon his finger might have done. He was not at all touched; but he felt the claim of a possible pang of loneliness and desolation in the dimness of decay, and, methodically, with all the appearances of a solicitous kindness, he responded to the claim.
The man, immersed in his rudimentary universe of sense, showed a host of atavistic fears; fears of the dark, of strange faces, fears of sudden noises or of long stillness. He often wept, leaning his swollen face on Gavan’s shoulder, filled with an abject self-pity.
“You know how I love you, Gavan,” he would again and again repeat, his lax lips fumbling with the words, “always loved you, ever since you were a little fellow—out in India, you know. I and your dear mother loved you better than life,” and, wagging his head, he would repeat, “better than life,” and break into sobs—sobs that ceased when the nurse brought him his wine-jelly. Then it might be again the tone of feeble whining. “It doesn’t taste right, Gavan. Can’t you make it taste right? Do you want to starve me between you all?”