‘Sorrow, thick and thick, are you calling down upon yourself,’ he said, ‘the bitterness of vain longing, doubled and redoubled. How can I tell you when and where you may meet again? Wander from magic incantation to incantation, strengthening your disappointment as you strengthen your longing. And—at the end, that meeting which shall be only on one side. Dread that reunion, dread that rediscovery of the lost. You will not find the lost again; you will find only the new, more beautiful thing into which her own beautiful action has transformed that which seemed lost. For merit plays its part in change, inward and outward. Through what endless trials had the holy lady Yasodhara to come before her high spotless Karma brought her at last to the side of the Blessed One Himself. Through all the ages she had lived on, ever higher and holier, before she could attain the end. And why should that which wore a woman’s shape continue still a woman, in its glorification? It was the man’s courage that showed. Can you be certain that what she was is not now a man—a man, perhaps, weak and earthly, but, after all, a man, by virtue of that one instant in which all woman’s weaknesses died in her, and only the bravery held firm. Life is freer, bolder, wider for a man; should not the free, bold soul pass on into a more fitting frame, where its opportunities will be greater and its trammels fewer? But why look forward into the great darkness of desire? Her Karma may even yet have dreadful sorrows to work out, yet from one sorrow, at least, it is now free. But I had come to you to-night because, after all my many years of life and much questioning, it has come to me to see farther than many across the fields of life, and sometimes to hear voices that other ears are not opened to hear. So I heard the crying voice of your hunger growing fierce in its loneliness, and I saw its sorrow deepening down the road of the future, and it seemed to me that perhaps I might give you help in loosening the bonds that bind you to the wheel of false desire. But now I know once more, as all life has taught me, that it is given to none to help his neighbour. Heaven and Hell we make for ourselves, sometimes thinking Hell is Heaven, and Heaven Hell, and no man can unseal our eyes or divert our course. So you must go on your way, Kingston, and I on mine, neither seeing what the other sees, strangers speaking unintelligible tongues. And it will be long before you see what I have grown to see. And yet, in the distance of time, that day will come, and you will be healed of all your sorrows. But now, in this life of yours, for a test and a hell and a torment will be the gratification of your longing when it comes. As a trial and a condemnation of you and yours will it come, suddenly, with disaster and despair, and the possessing of it will bring an anguish bitterer than any that has gone before, for that is the unchanging law of Desire. So I have brought you my message and my vain warning. The force of your craving will bring about its own accomplishment, as, sooner or later, all longing must bring about its accomplishment, and, at the same time, its penalty. For a terrible moment you will see your wish made flesh again, then all will pass away into darkness, and your last state, through your own action, will be worse than the first.’
Kingston might, in saner circumstances, have smiled at denunciations so fantastic. But the little old man, so quiet yet so earnest, had a strange inexplicable dominance. He might not be believed, but he must at any rate be respected. In all he said there was a deep passion of earnestness, wistful and solemn, that gave the wizened little figure in the outrageous European clothes something of the prophet’s tragic grandeur. Now, his mission being discharged, the visitor arose to start once more on his way. Kingston, in the feeling that he had no real part in this earthly world, could make no effort to detain him. Nor would any effort have succeeded. As he had come, abruptly, unannounced, so he would go, abruptly, without mitigating gradation of farewells.
Gently he gave his hand to Kingston.
‘Very far apart are we two,’ he said, with a whimsical smile of his dried lips. ‘We speak in different languages, across a barrier of worlds. Yet one day we shall draw together, and our hearts be made kin again. And now I must go. Say good-bye for me to your wife. Out of our passions we make whips for our own backs, and there are other passions besides that of love for others. She too, your wife, must pay the penalty that she has appointed for herself, and out of her fancied strength shall come the great weakness that shall impose on her, and you, and all, that punishment which wisdom would have helped you to avoid. None is good but he who does not know it.’
Kingston was not paying close attention. His mind was fixed on the hope thus made so definite, if perilous, of reunion with Isabel. He foresaw a second meeting, a second recognition, even though it might be one-sided. In the rapture of his hope he laughed at risks, and would face all the vague punishments foretold by the old man without a moment’s fear or hesitation, for the chance of setting eyes again, for however short a time, on the love that he had lost. In that hour the fires of youth flamed high in his heart, and he cared nothing what bitter waters might quench them once more in the end. In a dream he escorted the old man to the door, and watched him pass gently away into the void from which he had so suddenly emerged. Into the crowd of moving figures in the street the old man passed, and melted like a phantom. It was with almost the feeling of having been asleep and strangely dreamed that Kingston went back to the drawing-room, and found himself once more in the prosaic calm world where Gundred sat in a perpetual atmosphere of duty and terrestrial activities. When she returned to her husband with many questions as to the Bishop’s message, plans, and present whereabouts, Kingston could almost have believed that the last hour had been wiped out of his life, or, rather, had never formed a part of it. Her arrival made the whole episode so remote and so fantastic to look back upon that he could scarcely feel that it had really occurred at all. She was so practical, so busy, so matter-of-fact; visions and abstractions could not breathe in her neighbourhood, grew faint, vague, unreal, until the earthly life in which she moved appeared to be the only one with which sensible people could ever have to reckon. She had the not uncommon gift of making the invisible seem non-existent.
CHAPTER XVI
Kingston made haste to forget, as far as possible, the ominous prophecies that had descended on him, and in a rush of final activities the Season drew to an end. Gundred was beginning to turn her thoughts towards Brakelond, and as soon as the Eton and Harrow match was over, she decreed that they must take their flight thither. She had many duties to discharge there in a very short time, for, after little more than a fortnight, other duties would call them all northward to Ivescar for the hecatombs of the Twelfth. Meanwhile at Brakelond there was a new school to be opened, a Church Bazaar to be patronized, a Primrose League Fête presided over, and a horrid Radical fishmonger to be deprived of custom, with a stately autograph exposition of his crimes by the Lady Gundred Darnley. There were also a few lighter tasks, and especially a long-standing engagement to dine with the Hoope-Arkwrights. The Hoope-Arkwrights were new people of great wealth, who had bought the old house of the Restormels, beautified it regardless of expense, and ever since had been angling for the friendship of ‘the Castle.’ By Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s untiring benevolence towards bazaars, Gundred had at last been brought to accept an invitation to dine at Restormel. ‘Poor things,’ she said, ‘one should always give pleasure when one can, and really it will be quite enough to ask them to tea one day.’ Accordingly she had promised the Hoope-Arkwrights the favour of her presence, and graciously arranged her plans to fit in with the date of their festival. At the Eton and Harrow she shone resplendent in her favourite shades of mauve, to the devouring wrath of other mothers, who, in spite of artificial aids, only succeeded in looking their full forty or fifty. She scanned the gowns and yawned over the play, and paraded proudly about on the arm of Jim, imagining him to be delighted with the occasion, rather than in a cold sweat of horror at every moment, lest anyone else should hear the comments that his mother sent forth in her cool penetrating tones. Then, having discharged her duty by her son and the match, she drove back to Grosvenor Street and turned her thoughts to departure. Kingston would run down to Brakelond in the motor. Gundred enlarged on her longing to accompany him, but declared that duty imperiously called upon her to accompany the household by train, to see that the journey was made satisfactorily, without any loss of luggage, or extravagance, or indecorum of conduct. Accordingly, on the appointed day, the Lady Gundred Darnley might have been seen amid pyramids of parcels and stacks of trunks, taking her Hegira at the head of an army of retainers. As for Kingston, he had yet another day or so in town, and then must follow his wife down to the West so as not to disappoint those ‘poor Hoope-Arkwright people’ of the glory that had been promised them.
The weather was settled, and he anticipated a successful run. He was tired of London. There was heavy over him a sense of things about to happen. Matters seemed coming to a head. What his foreboding meant he could not tell; he had put the old uncle’s vague prophecies far away at the back of his consciousness, and attributed the oppression that crushed his spirits with a weight of impending catastrophe entirely to the influences of the thunderous weather and the air of London, stale and exhausted by the season. It was with relief that he got into the car on a radiant morning, and set out on his flight from the sultry city.
But the day’s journey was not prosperously made. The roads were dusty, the wind was baffling, the car went peevishly and ill. Panting heavily along, the machine traversed the beautiful heaths and uplands that lie to the west of London. Kingston had meant to break his journey far on the way. It was necessary that he should arrive at Brakelond in good time on the morrow, seeing that this festivity over which Gundred so fussed was due to take place that evening. And so, the distance down to the West being great, Kingston had planned to spend the necessarily intervening night at Salisbury, so as to give himself ample time to make the rest of the journey. However, after the long, unsatisfactory day of delays, a downright catastrophe at last brought him to a standstill, no farther advanced upon his pilgrimage than Basingstoke. In that once placid but now assertive little metropolis, hallowed at once by the memories of Mad Margaret and of Elizabeth Bennet, Kingston found himself forced to make his rest that night. He gave orders for an early start on the morrow, then wandered out from the grim desolation peculiar to English country hotels into the streets and market-place. Roaming from alley to alley, he contrasted old with new, and beneath the walls of the old Assembly Rooms, bent his mind to see the famous Ball where Darcy first sighted his destiny. Soon, within the old room above, barnlike now and desolate, ghostly lights were shining, and the tinkle of long-dead music was blending with the rhythmical tumult of many feet. Brilliant and entrancing, Elizabeth came and went, up and down the dance; Mary posed and minced, Kitty and Lydia were agog for partners. As the stranger outside stood and recalled that immortal scene, the visible world around him faded quickly away, and again he understood how much more real may be that which has no earthly existence than that which earthly hands may touch and earthly eyes examine. Streets and walls of Basingstoke, hideous clock-tower and town-hall—it was not that they were real; they were phantoms of an ugly hour; reality, for evermore, was that little town which never was and never will be, where dwelt those men and women that never lived on earth, and yet must live eternally—those men and women so far more vivid and lasting than the ghosts amid whom we live; those real men and women whose voices must ring on perennially down the ages, giving joy and satisfaction to generation after generation, until the English language has passed with Nineveh and Babylon into the limbo of things forgotten.