“Where is your servant?” Hamel asked.
Mr. Fentolin glanced around him carelessly.
“He has wandered away out of sight. He knows well how necessary solitude is to me if once I take the brush between my fingers—solitude natural and entire, I mean. If any one is within a dozen yards of me I know it, even though I cannot see them. Meekins is wandering somewhere the other side of the Tower.”
“Shall I call him?”
“On no account,” Mr. Fentolin begged. “Presently he will appear, in plenty of time. There is the morning to be passed—barely eleven o’clock, I think, now. I shall sit in my chair, and sink a little down, and dream of these beautiful lights, these rolling, foam-flecked waves, these patches of blue and shifting green. I can form them in my brain. I can make a picture there, even though my fingers refuse to move. You are not an aesthete, I think, Mr. Hamel? The study of beauty does not mean to you what it did to your father, and my father, and, in a smaller way to me.”
“Perhaps not,” Hamel confessed. “I believe I feel these things somewhere, because they bring a queer sense of content with them. I am afraid, though, that my artistic perceptions are not so keen as some men’s.”
Mr. Fentolin looked at him thoughtfully.
“It is the physical life in your veins—too splendid to permit you abstract pleasures. Compensations again, you see—compensations. I wonder what the law is that governs these things. I have forgotten sometimes,” he went on, “forgotten my own infirmities in the soft intoxication of a wonderful seascape. Only,” he went on, his face a little grey, “it is the physical in life which triumphs. There are the hungry hours which nothing will satisfy.”
His head sank, his chin rested upon his chest. He had all the appearance now of a man who talks in bitter earnest. Yet Hamel wondered. He looked towards the Tower; there was no sign of Meekins. The sea-gulls went screaming above their heads. Mr. Fentolin never moved. His eyes seemed half closed. It was only when Hamel rose to his feet that he looked swiftly up.
“Stay with me, I beg you, Mr. Hamel,” he said. “I am in one of the moods when solitude, even for a moment, is dangerous. Do you know what I have sometimes thought to myself?”