"That must be sufficiently dangerous," Mr. Iglesias remarked.
"Bless you, yes. Players breaks their backs pretty frequent, and cuts the ponies about most cruel—"
He ceased speaking abruptly, jammed the brake down with his heel in response to the conductor's bell, and drew the sweating horses up short to permit the ingress of fresh passengers. This accomplished, the omnibus lumbered onwards while Dominic Iglesias fell into further meditation.
The explanation vouchsafed him was still far from explicit; yet this much of illumination he gained from it, namely, the assurance that all these goodly personages, Alaric Barking and his sweet companion among them, were on pleasure bent. One and all they fared forth, on this heavy summer afternoon, in search of amusement—in search of that intangible yet very powerful factor in human affairs to which it is given to lift the too great weight of seriousness from mortal life, cheating perception of relentless actualities, helping to restore the balance, helping men to hope, to laugh, and to forget. Perceiving all which, conscious moreover of the near neighbourhood of Loneliness on the right hand and Old Age on the left, Iglesias began to bestow on these votaries of pleasure a more earnest attention, recognising in them the possessors of a secret which it greatly behoved him to enter into possession of likewise. In what, he asked himself, did it actually consist, this to him practically unknown quantity, amusement? How was the spirit of it cultivated, the enjoyment of it consciously attained? How far did it reside in inward attitude, how far in outward circumstance? In a word, how did they all do it? It was very incumbent upon him to learn, and he admitted a ridiculous ignorance.
CHAPTER III
Thus had the chapter of labour ended, and that of leisure opened. And it was with the sadness of things terminated very strongly upon him that, as Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, finished clearing the dinner-table and departed, Mr. Iglesias looked forth over the neatly protected verdure of Trimmer's Green in the evening quiet. The smugly pacific aspect of the place irritated him. He was aware of a great emptiness. And very certainly the scene before him offered no solution of the problem of the filling of that emptiness. And somehow or other it had to be filled—Iglesias knew that, knew it through every fibre of him—or life would be simply insupportable. Meanwhile from the public drawing-room below came sounds of revelry, innocent enough yet hardly calculated to soothe over-strained nerves. Little Mr. Farge—whose thin and reedy tenor carried as does a penny whistle—gave forth the refrain of a song just then popular in metropolitan music-halls.
"They're keeping latish hours at the Convalescent Home," piped Mr. Farge; while his friend and devout admirer, Albert Edward Worthington, tore at the banjo strings and the ladies tittered.
Iglesias listened in a somewhat grim spirit of endurance. On the far side of the Green he could see the gaslights in the Lovegroves' dining-room. These appeared to watch him rather uncomfortably, as with three supplicating and reproachful eyes. He debated whether he would not take his hat, step across, and tell his old friend what had happened—it would at least relieve him of the sound of little Farge's serenading. But his pride recoiled somehow. Good souls, man and wife, they would be full of solicitude and kindness; but they would say the wrong thing. They would not understand. How, indeed, should they, being wholly at one with their surroundings—unimaginative, domestic, British middle-class, with its virtues and limitations aggressively in evidence? George Lovegrove would suggest some minor municipal office, or membership of the local borough council, as a crown of consolation. His wife would skirt round the subject of matrimony. She had done so before now; and Iglesias, while presenting a dignified front to the enemy, had inwardly shuddered. She was an excellent, estimable woman; but when ponderously arch, when extensively sly! Oh, dear no! It didn't do. Her gambols were too sadly suggestive of those of a skittish hippopotamus. Dominic Iglesias was conscious that he had a skin too little to-night; he could not witness them with philosophy. The kindliest intention, the best-meant words, might cause him extravagant annoyance.
He turned away from the window and took a turn the length of the room—a tall, distinct, and even stately figure in the thickening dusk. He felt rather horribly desolate. He was fairly frightened by the greatness of the emptiness, within and about him, engendered by absence of employment. He had little to reproach himself with. His record was cleaner than most men's—he could not but know that. He had sacrificed personal ambition, personal happiness, to the service of one supremely dear to him. Not for a moment did he regret it. Had it to be done all over again, without hesitation he would do it. Still there was no blinking facts. Here was the nemesis, not of ill living, but of good—namely, emptiness, loneliness, homelessness, Old Age here at his elbow, Death waiting there ahead.