The thought was hideous. Was it possible that those writings, born of his mental torture, robbing him of every friend he valued—-was it thinkable that they had been used for gross purposes?
His fingers again played rapidly against the windows as he wrestled with the sudden ugly suspicion. At last, utterly exhausted, he sank into a chair.
'There is only one thing I can do,' he said decisively; 'return to America at once. If, as I have thought, her neutrality is in tune with the highest; if my fellow-countrymen are imbued with such a spirit of infinite mercifulness that from them will flow the healing streams to cure the wounds of bleeding Europe, then I have carried a lamp whose light reflects the face of God. . . . But if . . .'
II.
That night a glorious moonlight silvered the roof-tops of old London, touching its jumbled architecture with fantastic beauty.
Vagrant towers and angular church spires, uninspired statuary, and weary, smoke-darkened trees shed their garments of commonplaceness and shimmered like the mosques and turrets of an enchanted city.
It was one of those nights that are sent to remind us that Beauty still lives; a night to challenge our mad whirl of bargaining and barter, to urge us to raise our eyes from the grubbing crawling of avarice; a night to awaken old memories, and to stir the pent-up streams of poetry lying asleep in every breast.
It was a moonlight that descended on Old England's troubled heart as a benediction. Her rivers were glimmering paths winding about the country-side; her villages and her heavy-scented country lanes shared its caress with open meadows and murky cities. The sea, binding the little islands in its turbulent immensity, drew the night's beauty to its bosom, and the spray of foam rising from the surf was a shower of star-dust leaping towards the moon.
As a weary traveller drinks thirstily at a pool, Selwyn wandered about the streets trembling with emotion in the breathless ecstasy of the night. All day the conjured picture of the German boy, guilty of no crime save blind devotion to his Fatherland, had haunted him like the eyes of a murdered man. It had robbed him of the power of constructive thought, and stopped his writing with the decisiveness of a sword descending on his wrist; it had made the food on his table tasteless, and given him a dread of the solitude of his rooms.
With nerves that contracted at every untoward sound, he had gone out at dark, and gradually the peacefulness of the night had soothed and calmed him as the dew of dusk cools the earth after the heat of a summer's day. The familiar strains of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' came to his mind, and as he walked he idly traced the different movements of the music in the moods of the evening's witchery.