Lord Hayle had taken this advice to heart, and on this very afternoon he had opened the whole question.
His remarks had been received quietly enough—the two men were friends who could not easily become estranged—but the interview had been by no means a satisfactory one. "It's perfectly true, Gerald," the duke had said. "I am going through a period of great mental strain and disturbance. But I can't tell you anything about it. It is a mental battle which I must fight out for myself. No one can possibly help me, not even you or Constance. All I can tell you is that there is absolutely nothing in it that is in any way wrong. I am in no material trouble at all. Let me go my own way. Some day you shall know what there is to know, but not yet."
The duke walked down the busy "Corn" towards Carfax and the entrance to the "High"—the most beautiful street in Europe. He was on his way to his rooms in Paul's. The interview with Lord Hayle had disturbed him. It had brought him face to face with hard fact, insistent, recurring fact, which was always present and would not be denied.
His mind was busy as a mill. The thoughts churned and tossed there like running water under the fans of a wheel. There was no peace anywhere, that was the worst of all.
And to-day, of all days, was important. It was the early afternoon of the evening on which the play called The Socialist was to be presented at the Park Lane Theatre. He had obtained special permission to go to town by the evening train—there would be no accident this time—and he knew that to-morrow, whether the play was a success or a failure, his name would be in every one's mouth.
All Oxford, all London, all Society was talking about the play that would see light in a few hours. The public interest in it was extraordinary; his own interest in it was keen and fierce, with a fierceness and keenness a thousand times more strenuous than any one knew. He did not fear that he, as a typical representative of his class and order, would be caricatured or held up to economic execration. Even if it were so—and he was aware of Rose's intention—he did not care twopence. He feared nothing of that sort. He feared that he might become convinced.
For it had come to that.
A complete change and bouleversement of opinion and outlook is not nearly so long a process as many people are apt to suppose. To some natures it is true that conviction, or change of conviction, comes slowly. In the case of the majority this is not so. With many people a settled order of mind, a definite attitude towards life, a fixed set of principles, are the results of heredity or environment. A man thinks in such-and-such a way, and is content with thinking in such-and-such a way simply because the other side of the question has not been presented to him with sufficient force. A Conservative, for example, hears Radical arguments, as a rule, through the medium of a Conservative paper, with all the answers and regulations in the next column.
It had been thus with the Duke of Paddington. He had lived a life absolutely walled-in from outside influences, Eton and Oxford, an intensely exclusive circle of that society which surrounds the Court. He had been shut away from everything which might have turned his thoughts to the larger issues of life.
Enlightenment, knowledge, had come suddenly and had come with irresistible force. Reviewing the past weeks, as the duke sometimes did with a sort of bitter wonder, he dated the change in his life from the actual moment when he was crushed down into the swift unconsciousness when the railway accident occurred outside Paddington Station. Since then his mental progress had been steady and relentless. James Fabian Rose, Mr. Goodrick, Peter Conrad, the parson, were all men of extreme intellectual power. Arthur Burnside also was unique in his force and grip, his vast and ever-increasing knowledge. And Mary Marriott—Mary, the actress!—the duke thought as little of Mary Marriott as he possibly could—she came into his thoughts too often for the peace of a loyal gentleman pledged irrevocably to another girl.