‘Do you think so? Well, brains are a good gift, better perhaps than gold.’
Phil stared at his father for a moment in blank amazement, then he turned on his heel and left the room without a word.
CHAPTER XX
After Philip had gone, Richard Meadowes leaned back in his chair with closed eyes for a long time. The past was stirred in him by this quarrel. In the twenty years that had elapsed since Anne Champion’s death he had changed very little outwardly; but the soul had travelled a long road these twenty years. Now looking back over the ‘Past’s enormous disarray’ he scarcely recognised himself for the same man he had been. He that had started so eagerly in the race, how he lagged now! he had not an enthusiasm left, and smiled to remember all he used to have. At one time too he remembered having thought about things spiritual; these did not visit him now. Once even he had feared death and judgment; death now-a-days had ceased to appall him, and for judgment he thought of it as an old-world fable. He could even think of Anne Champion’s sad story and her cruel end with no more than a momentary pang of discomfort.
But for all this the soul was still partially alive in this man. He could still suffer, and that is a sign of vitality, and if he had a genuine sentiment left it was for his son.
His suffering indeed was of a purely egotistical sort. The vast failure he had made of life struck a sort of cold despair through him; Phil must make restitution for his failures; and now the coldest thought of all assailed him: he had not Phil’s heart. He had lavished kindness on the boy all his life, yet sometimes Phil would look at him in his curiously expressive fashion and turn away quickly as if to hide the thought that leapt out from his speaking eyes: ‘I know you, I understand you.’
But whether Phil loved him or not, thought he, he could not afford to quarrel with him after this fashion. Everything else in life had failed; Phil at least he must keep!
Meadowes rose hurriedly and went in search of Phil, who had gone out, it appeared, across the Park.
The sun had come out now, after the rain, and its warmth drew up the smell of the mould from the streaming moisture-laden earth.
‘Earth, where I shall soon lie,’ thought Meadowes; ‘earth, that will absorb me into its elements again. Then the great failure will be at an end, the puzzle solved—no, not solved, only concluded: solved would mean another life, and that would mean—— Ah! the opened Books, and the Face from which earth and heaven flee away, and the Voice crying: “Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward.” Tush, why does that old nonsense so ring in the brain?’