XLI
There was a revival of public interest in the destruction of Pleydon's statue at Hesperia, the papers again printed accounts colored by a variety of attitudes unembarrassed by fact; and the serious journals united in a dignity of eminently safe praise. At first Linda made an effort to preserve these; but soon their similarity, her inability to find, among sonorous periods, any trace of Dodge's spirit—in reality she knew so blindingly much more than the most penetrating critical intellect—caused her to leave the reviews unread. No one else living had understood Pleydon; and when descriptions of his life spoke of the austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda thought of the brittle glove in the gilt-lacquer box.
Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all the unintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma. She had a distinct sense of overwhelming loss—of something, Linda was obliged to add, she had never owned. However, she realized that during Pleydon's life she had dimly expected a happy accident of explanation; until almost the last, yes—after she had returned from that ultimate journey, she had been conscious of the presence of hope. The hope had been for herself, created out of her constant baffled dissatisfaction.
But now the man in whom solely she had been expressed, the only possible reason for her obstinate pride, had left her in a world that, but for Arnaud's fondness, looked on her without remark. The loss of her distinction had been finally evident at balls, in the dresses in which Vigné had thought her so wonderful, and she dropped them. Here, she repeated, was when affection, generously radiated through life, should have reflected over her a tranquil and contented joy. She had never given it, and she was without the ability to receive. She admitted to herself, with a little annoyed laugh, that her old desire for inviolable charm, for the integrity of a memorable slimness, was unimpaired. It was, she thought, too ridiculously inappropriate for words.
Yet it had changed slightly into the recognition that what so often had been called her beauty was all she now had for sustenance, all she had ever had. Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and—deep in the mystery of his passion—she was suddenly invaded by an insistent desire to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke to Arnaud at once about this; and alone, through his delicacy of perception, Linda went to Boston the following day.
The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea—a brilliant serene blue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories, hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at the immaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cluster of houses, gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping to a harbor that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spread drying sails.
The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still as the anchored schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Linda found the Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovable base of rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stood well in advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the white steeple Dodge had described. She found a bench by a path in the thin grass; and there, her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, her gaze and longing were lifted to the fixed aspiration.
From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky; Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, was the future, but which for Linda represented all the past. This conviction flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failure weighed on her, no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetually vague. Her thoughts gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalled the curious vividness of his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten. She, too, tried to remember that time and age. It was almost in her grasp, but her realization was spoiled by absurd mental fragments—the familiar illusion of a leopard and a rider with bright hair, a forest with the ascending voices of angels, and an ominous squat figure with a slowly nodding plumed head.