“You will charge that young person to give news of your health, however,” said I, insinuating that I expected to see Miss Herbert.
“Certainly, sir; and if it should be your pleasure that she should dine with you, to preserve appearances—”
“You are right, madam; your remark is full of wisdom. I shall expect to meet her.” And again I bowed low, and ere she recovered from another reverential courtesy I had closed the door behind me, and was half-way downstairs.
CHAPTER XX. THE MYSTERY EXPLAINED
As between the man who achieves greatness and him who has greatness thrust upon him there lies a whole world of space, so is there an immense interval between one who is the object of his own delusions and him who forms the subject of delusion to others.
My reader may have already noticed that nothing was easier for me than to lend myself to the idle current of my fancy. Most men who build “castles in Spain,” as the old adage calls them, do so purely to astonish their friends. I indulged in these architectural extravagances in a very different spirit. I built my castle to live in it; from foundation to roof-tree, I planned every detail of it to suit my own taste, and all my study was to make it as habitable and comfortable as I could. Ay, and what's more, live in it I did, though very often the tenure was a brief one; sometimes while breaking my egg at breakfast, sometimes as I drew on my gloves to walk out, and yet no terror of a short lease ever deterred me from finishing the edifice in the most expensive manner. I gilded my architraves and frescoed my ceilings as though all were to endure for centuries; and laid out the gardens and disposed the parterres as though I were to walk in them in my extreme old age. This faculty of lending myself to an illusion by no means adhered to me where the deception was supplied by another; from the moment I entered one of their castles, I felt myself in a strange house. I continually forgot where the stairs were, what this gallery opened on, where that corridor led to. No use was it to say, “You are at home here. You are at your own fireside.” I knew and I felt that I was not.
By this declaration I mean my reader to understand that, while ready for any exigency of a story devised by myself, I was perfectly miserable at playing a part written for me by a friend; nor was this feeling diminished by the thought that I really did not know the person I was believed to represent; nor had I the very vaguest clew to his antecedents or belongings.
As I set out in search of Miss Herbert, these were the reflections I revolved, occasionally asking myself, “Is the old lady at all touched in the upper story? Is there not something private-asylumish in these wanderings?” But still, apart from this special instance, she was a marvel of acuteness and good sense. I found Miss Herbert in a little arbor at her work; the newspaper on the bench beside her.
“So,” said she, without looking up, “you have been making a long visit upstairs. You found Mrs. Keats very agreeable, or you were so yourself.”