And Gerald smiled. “I recognize that phrase. So throughout thirty years Lichfield has never once forgotten its polite formula for exorcising the inadmissible!”
“It has been generally felt,” the youngster answered, “that a prominent man of letters was entitled to his Egeria. Of recent years, to be sure, your friendship has not been—we will say,—so ardent nor so frequently manifested. But there has been, to hold you two together, the boy begotten by your body upon her body. There has been the long usage to hold you two together. So your friendship has remained unshattered.”
“I had forgotten,” Gerald said, “the boy. Yes, I remember hearing that you had thoughtfully provided me with offspring during my absence. I know not quite how to thank you, my dear fellow, for a favor so delicate and so personal. We will therefore cough and drop the subject.”
Then Gerald leaned back in the chair. He put together his finger-tips, and smilingly he looked at them with rather tired, old eyes.
“So I stay faithful to one woman, after all! I have been kept in everything a model American citizen. I have gracefully adhered to the code of a gentleman. In my private life I have evinced every proper respect for the chivalrous sacrament of adultery between social equals. In the field of my professional labors I have composed no puerile and lascivious romances, but only serious and instructive works. I am, in brief, in all respects, a credit to my native Lichfield, and, more generally, to the United States of America.”
He shrugged. He spread out those old-looking, futile hands.
“Well, certainly I must not spoil the miracle. So I submit. I yield to the demands of propriety. I accept my personal good behavior; I accept my success; and I accept also my measure of actual famousness.”
Then Gerald said: “Therefore I must, so long as my life lasts, continue faithfully your work as the recorder of historical and scientific truths, since it was such truths which brought my name into famousness. Oh, yes, you may depend upon it, I shall henceforward honor these fine truths within the limits advisable for anybody now nearing sixty. I shall serve them, that is, with my pen rather than with other instruments now perhaps more fallible. For the trained intelligence of such a famous scholar as I have become cannot deny their proper importance to those scientific and historical truths which brought him into famousness,—nor would, of course, my admirers care to have me abandoning my métier.”
And Gerald said also: “Even in the private relations which you have chivalrously preserved for me, my dear fellow, one must not ask everything. Wheresoever a man lives, there will be a thornbush near his door: and I can manage well enough, I daresay, to put up with the continuance of this illicit love-affair,—in which, after all, my advanced age now protects me from being put to any frequent or far-reaching inconvenience. Meanwhile, the legend of a life-long illicit love-affair is a very splendid preservative for the fame of any writer. It would have been even better, of course, if in conjugating the verb to love, you had managed to make a few mistakes in gender; that is more piquant; that is infallible: still, I repeat, one must not ask everything. I have my satisfying legend of private immorality, created without any least trouble on my part. Men will remember it. So all ends very well indeed. I am content with what I have found upon Mispec Moor. I am content with what I have found in Lichfield. And I shall not bother any more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found nothing.”
“Do you not be speaking lightly of Antan! For I—do you not understand?”—the young man spoke with an almost frightened elation,—“it is I who am called to reign in Antan. You have brought me the revealing word and the dreadful summons of Horvendile. Antan is my appointed kingdom, into which I shall now be entering upon the silver stallion famous in old prophecies.”