Than to walk all day like the Sultan of old in a garden of
spice.
“I am not far from that end,” he added then went on with his reading.
There was truth in what he said, and he would not have exchanged his state for one more active, even though it had been an activity that promised happiness. For in happiness he had no faith. It did exist on earth—in the form of sleep; all other bliss he held to be illusion. Heights to which he had once looked up with envious eyes, he did not now contemplate; if a glimpse of them arrested him, he hurriedly turned away, pained by a sudden sense of unrest. The thought of exertion was intolerable. His reading was no longer study, but mere pastime in idle pages; books which demanded thought or suggested a high and energetic ideal, he put aside. This habit of mind, at first involuntary, he was beginning to take consciously for his direction; it preserved to him an even calm, which was now the most desirable of things.
“Do not tell me of your work,” he wrote to Gabriel in London. “It will seem unfriendly that I should not wish to Hear of it, but your progress and achievements I take for granted; they are the essence of the distinction between your world and my own. When you say you have done this, and are planning that, it disturbs me, I know not how; I neither act nor plan, and hope never again to do either. Formerly, when I should gladly have heard these details, you kept them from me; pray do so now. The change in yourself which this new habit implies, I believe I understand. There is a joyful tone in all you write, formerly never to be found. You are less severe, more human. Naturally so; success is before you, and the anxious toil of your years of poverty is at an end. I, too, have ceased to fear poverty—thanks to you—but I dread the more anything that can give a shock to my placid materialism. I dread awakenings of sympathy, I dread discontent, I dread the ideal.”
Whereto Clement Gabriel took occasion to reply:
“My friend, you are in a bad way. Fortunately you are young; there is hope for you in the years that bring the philosophic mind. Allow me to suggest that your present mind contains as little of the philosophic as it well could. I will not for the present trouble you about my doings. We will talk over them when you have recovered your interest in the things which alone are worth living for.”
So the days moved on. Towards the end of the first week in June, Kingcote exhibited a slight return of restlessness; he complained, when Mary questioned him, that he could not sleep; it was nothing, it would pass. It did not, however, pass immediately. For ten days the trouble of mind or body rather grew than diminished; the old dislike of society showed itself, and at length he seemed to be shrinking from his daily occupations. Mr. Billimore, who was observant, noticed that he displayed much anxiety to take the letters from the postman, when the latter came into the shop each morning, and that an examination of the batch seemed always to occasion him some disappointment. But the trouble did in the end prove transitory. A day or two of headache, which kept him to his room, led back to the ordinary routine of life. Business received attention in the usual way, and his impassive countenance was restored....
A week later, there came to the shop a messenger from a hotel, with a note addressed to Mr. Kingcote. He was at that moment in the house; knowing he would appear speedily, Mr. Billimore laid the note on his master’s desk in the counting-house. Within a few minutes Kingcote entered, and took up the envelope carelessly. He dropped it again as if it had burnt him.
Mr. Billimore was advancing to explain by whom the note had been left. Kingcote’s face struck him as so singular, that he retired into the shop without having spoken.