Sombre hucksters, clerks, shopkeepers moved up and down the dingy roadway. To Kingston, by now, they were but vapours; the street had changed, and its population was of old friends, bright and clearly recognised. Here strutted Wickham and Denny through the dusk, red-coated and raffish, in attendance on the giggling Lydia; and ‘stuffy Uncle Phillips, breathing port wine,’ came lumbering paunchily towards his doorway. Here, where a modern Emporium had faded away, giving place to the neat-fronted little shop of bygone days, shone the shoe-roses that were to dance at Netherfield, and the bonnet that Lydia bought because it was ‘not so very ugly.’ Farther on, again, the pretentious hotel where Kingston was to spend his night had melted into vacancy. In its place stood the long, rambling inn, whitened, clean and simple, with its pillared portico and its hospitable entrance. And whose lumbering chariot was it that stood there at the door, whose high turban and commanding beak loomed out of its deep, cavernous recesses? Surely, surely there was Lady Catherine angrily demanding the road to Longbourne, and insisting that the morrow’s weather must certainly be fine? And now Mr. Bingley rode along on his black horse, blue coat and all; Charlotte Lucas stepped briskly by on an errand; Darcy came escorting the effusive Caroline to the shop; last of all appeared the centre of the vision—the world, rather, where all those visions had been born and made real—the deceptively meek and mild little maiden with the twinkling eyes; the demure and inconspicuous spinster in whom dwelt the keenest spirit that ever spoke in English, or looked out for English ‘follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies.’ Round-cheeked, prematurely capped, sedate, Miss Austen pattered on her road. It was with a sudden cold shock that her passing called back Kingston into the world of to-day. Gone again was the real Basingstoke in a flash, and all the real people that had dwelt there—gone like the sudden wreckage of a dream. Now there stretched before his eyes only the crude and banal sordor of the prosaic modern town. Jude the Obscure, and Sue, and beastly Arabella had violently usurped the place of Bingley and Darcy and adorable Elizabeth. Everything was changed to ugliness and squalor. Kingston, chilled and saddened, returned to the hotel which once more stood on the site of that old inn where the Misses Bennet had eaten their nuncheon.
In the morning, when the time came for Kingston to set off once more on his journey, even the bustling streets of to-day had a cheerfulness of their own. The sun was shining brilliantly, the motor had recovered its good humour, everything looked solid and practical and businesslike and wholesome. The vision of the twilight had passed. Jane Austen was once more dust of Winchester Cathedral, and the butchers and bakers and grocers who stood by their shop-doors and counters were now the sole occupants of the little town; the mystic walls had melted into modern brick and stucco, the ghosts had faded back into the world they came from. And yet, as Kingston went on his way, he knew that in a hundred years or less the case would be reversed again, as he had seen it reversed in the dusk of the previous evening. For ultimate reality conquers ephemeral, apparent reality, and the butchers and the bakers and the grocers would long since have passed away, and become indistinguishable drift again of the earth, with no memory to say that they had ever worn flesh at all; but Bingley and Darcy and Elizabeth would still be there, eternally young, unforgotten and unforgettable. For what death can touch the life invisible? Reality lives on for ever; it is only the composite, the visible, the tangible, that can break up in change, and pass, and disappear. The solid is the only phantom.
On and on through the tranquil glory of the day and the country the motor sped willingly upon its course, put to its highest pressure of flight, that the whole distance might be accomplished in as little time as might be. To-day it ungrudgingly gave its best energies to travelling cheerfully, indefatigably, briskly. Through sleepy little towns it hummed and whirred; along deep lanes, and under the shadow of great ancient forests. Then by degrees the way became more open. The road wound on, over stretch after stretch of purple moorland, dotted here and there with sparse pines or hollies that had watched the hunting of William the Norman; over vast tracts of heather and sedge, over hill and valley of the wide country. By now the clear freshness of morning had given way to the leaden glare of midday. The air was thick and dull with heat, and banked clouds indistinguishably crowded the dome of heaven, only occasionally permitting a pale sun to pierce the haze. The sky had no longer any colour; an indeterminate brassy heat pervaded it, and its farthest distance melted sullenly into the livid profundities of the landscape, till there was no horizon, only one vague vapour filling the uttermost parts of the world.
Kingston drove on unregarding. The road was clear and uneventful; his mind, released from the motorist’s incessant agony as to hens, inexperienced dogs, defiant children, and deaf old women who abruptly cross at corners, was left free to occupy itself with the wonder suggested by his visit of the night before to shadowland. What, after all, was this reality that all men think of? He himself, at once solid and evanescent, of what was he built? Of what were all his neighbours built? Where was the permanent element in them? Flesh and body and bones must go; following the logical sequence, he saw that resemblances must go, recognitions, and the consequent reintegration of bygone personal passions. So far that mysterious old man from the East had been right. These superficial passions belong to the superficial Self, and must pass away when the superficial Self resolves itself once more into the elements of which it had originally been composed; but behind all this, above all this, there must needs be some immortal part, some real Self that could recognise the eternal reality in the creations of an old maid’s vanished brain, and understand that the invisible has a very solid and a very vital existence. As he thought the matter through, the sense of physical personality began to melt away. Gradually he grew into comprehension of the fact that the He of everyday life, the He that has wants, angers, hungers, thirst—the He, in fact, that everyone imagines to be the enduring, everlasting entity, that all men crave and agonize to believe immortal, has really, in the everlasting truth of things, no genuine existence whatever. The only He that could pass on into immortality was the mysterious something behind, the indestructible Thought that could call the body and all its manifestations into being, and then, when tired, dismiss the body again into corruption and go forward on its road. Unable, of course, fully to dissever his consciousness from the consciousness of physical existence, his mind, in the absorbed immobility of his limbs, found itself more and more nearly able to face the fact that its personality had nothing to do with the earthly Kingston Darnley. The earthly Kingston Darnley, the thing that wore clothes, and ate, and drank, and was cold if naked, and cross if hungry, and angry if denied its wishes—that was a mere accident, built of earthly accidents like itself, no more capable of immortality than the food it wanted or the clothes that made so large a part of what it called its existence. As they, in an hour or a year, must dissolve and pass back into their constituent elements so must that phantasmal Self of his resolve itself, in the course of a few seasons more, into its constituent elements again, and die for ever with the death of its own desires. Only the inner, secret Self must go for ever forward upon the upward way, untouched by all the shifting changes which that earthly, ghostly Self might suffer. And Isabel, the lost thing for which he was searching, what was she, and to which Self did she belong—the real or the phantom Self? Was she the creation of his higher or his lower desires? And if he was to find her, as now he felt a growing certainty that he must, what would she be? Into what form would the splendour of her last moment have transferred her? And now he began to remember more vividly the old man’s warning. With what peril of agony and disappointment was fraught his quest, its realization and attainment? By the attainment of one’s keenest desire comes that anguish of disappointment which is fierce in proportion to the fierceness of the desires that called it into being. Desire, by satisfying itself, begets desire, and so, with each fresh craving and its gratification, the chain of suffering grows heavier and stronger, binding the soul more and more fast prisoner in the bondage of pain. For a moment he saw this clearly, understood that only in freedom from the hungers of the lower self can spring that freedom from sorrow which is the ultimate end of all human ambition, the goal of all humanity’s highest hopes, here and in the hereafter. Then his vision clouded, and the lower self intruded its presence once more. His mind dwelt on the achievement of his quest, the long-delayed reunion with the thing that had been lost. Even had he willed to escape, he remembered now that in a moment of what had then been mere fantasy he had plighted his troth to Isabel far down the future. Now, though she might perhaps be free, he was tightly bound—at once by his pledge as by his desires. Perhaps, in so far as his desires had forcibly purged themselves from grossness, the grossness of his bondage might be softened. But a slave he needs must be to the craving which he had so fomented by indulgence through so many desirous years. A dim fear began to fall like a veil across the radiance of his anticipation. Now he understood that reunion with Isabel could not be quite what he had thought and longed for. There must be some change, and with that change must come suffering. He had said, in the ardour of his desideration, that he would take all risks of sorrow. Now he first felt that the risks might well be heavy, and the sorrow sooner or later inevitable. A sense of foreboding filled him. What he wanted that he should have, and with his satisfaction must come that grief of dust and ashes which always makes the gratification of one desire the prelude of its yet bitterer successor, even as the drunkard’s satisfaction of his craving only means the renewal of a redoubled, more insatiable craving on the morrow. His desire should achieve its end, and with that achievement find only the beginning of another desire and a keener pain. A vague, mysterious fear of the path which he had set himself to tread now dominated all his thoughts. It had seemed to lead into such bright places. But now shadows lay thick across it, and its way stretched down towards the abysses. He began to dread the road on which he had so deliberately set his course ever since that violent sorrow of twenty years before. He was suddenly afraid of that future for which he had so long been craving, and shrank from the fulfilment of his longer, eager quest.
Without delay or misadventure, the motor covered the distances with untiring appetite as fast as they unfolded themselves, further and further into blue horizon after blue horizon. Brakelond was nearing; Kingston might soon expect to see its mysterious mass dominating the lesser hills and woods. There was now but one steep barrier of hills to surmount—a slow, straight climb of three miles or more to the summit of a ridge—and thence the road would drop straight over easy declivities to the last brief levels that would still separate the traveller from his destination. Already the hill stretched ahead of Kingston. Before him, with the appalling directness of those eternal Roman roads, the white ribbon stretched taut and stern, away and away to the crown of the pass. Kingston set the motor to breast the long rise with all its might, for there was no time to waste. His calculations had run things very fine. He had only another hour or so to get home, wash, dress, and be ready to accompany Gundred on her mission of condescension. If he failed, he knew well the neat reproaches that would meet him, the mild sighings, the pathetic resignation so much harder to bear than any objurgations. He pushed the motor to its utmost exertions.
The acclivity was now climbing over open moorland. Away to right and left fell the slopes of the hill towards the rich levels far beneath. Evening was shedding its glamour over the country, and all the details of the way were transfigured by the magic of twilight. Straight ahead, over the edge of the pass, the sun was setting in a splendour of scarlet that spread a solid beam of fire from pole to pole, beneath the solid purple of the cloud-banks that rolled and towered up towards the zenith. The air beneath was a-quiver with fire, and the earth was kindled to a fierce and lucent tone of violet, hot, yet solemn, mysterious, almost tragic in the breathless stillness of the evening. Against the glare beyond, the climbing road shone cold and ghastly under the unbroken cloud-masses overhead, grey as a rain-washed bone by contrast with the amethyst of the earth and the sudden furious glory of the sky. Leading up over darkness to that scarlet furnace in the west, it might have been the very way to Hell. Terrible ghosts might be mounting its straight, still stretch. As the motor gradually rolled up its slopes, Kingston saw that there was indeed a wayfarer upon the road. Far away as yet, hardly discernible, a black speck was nearing the summit of the pass. A quick, fantastic terror suddenly seized on Kingston; he shrank from overtaking the wanderer, from passing him, from seeing his face. Even from afar that solitary figure had a malign influence. It was some ominous and evil thing, that remote point of darkness on the ghostly pallor of the road. The moments, as they throbbed by, seemed big with terrible events about to be born. A dreadful hush of expectation filled the world. And still the motor climbed pitilessly, gaining on the pedestrian so far ahead. Kingston encouraged his foolish instincts so as the better to laugh at them. It was this strange evening that had given him such a start—this strange evening, filled with an immemorial, awful loneliness. This light was mysterious and haunting—the deep sombre purples of the moorland, the grim, cold whiteness of the road—and then, at the end of the gloom, that abrupt, ferocious glare beyond, that terrifying blaze of the sunset between the two rims of darkness above and beneath. The whole effect was unearthly, almost crushing. And the world seemed holding its breath; nothing stirred, no leaf, no zephyr; the cry of no bird could be discerned, and even the dry susurrence of the heather-bells was stilled in the blank immobility of the atmosphere. And through the uncanny hush the throbs and pantings of the motor broke obtrusively, like the agonies of some great monster in travail, intensifying by contrast the vast loneliness of the silence. And there, arriving at the crown of the pass, moved on the one sign of life that occurred anywhere in the desolate prospect. That sign of life added a strangely jarring, menacing note.
And then to Kingston’s cherished feelings of mystic awe was abruptly added another. That figure far up on the grey road was no stranger. He knew it well, had known it from time immemorial—known it and yet feared it. The instinct came upon him with a crash, like the sudden recognition of something dreadful that leaps into a nightmare. It was no qualm; it was a certainty. He knew that when he should have reached the summit of the ridge he would look back at the wayfarer’s face and see—what, he could not tell, but something, at all events, that he had known for years. The feeling grew on him, and grew and grew, until at last a devouring curiosity annihilated his previous dread. He abandoned himself to the influences of the wizard twilight, and allowed himself to nurse these fantasies which daylight could not have conceived, nor his daylight self been brought to tolerate. Now, however, by the poised, watchful dusk, their power was strengthened and made momentarily heavier. Overwhelming impulses of acquaintanceship seized Kingston. Who could it be that had so enthralled his attention even from afar? And now they were close upon the mystery. It wore a man’s figure, lithe and tall, in a dark knickerbocker suit. Suddenly it turned at the noise of their coming, and looked round. Kingston had one instant of suspense, then fell headlong into an abyss of self-contempt. He had so cosseted his absurdities that he had come at last to believe in them. Why, this wanderer was simply a respectable young gentleman of one-and-twenty or so, whom he had never set eyes on in his life before. He was good-looking, too—brilliantly good-looking, with fine features, a beautifully springy form, and splendid grey eyes, but a total stranger none the less. Kingston felt a pang of disappointment; but though on the surface he knew that he had never seen the boy before, yet a dim instinct within him still obstinately insisted that this was no first meeting. The instinct would not be cried down by perverse facts; it clamoured for recognition, and gradually the former acute feeling of curiosity and acquaintance began to rise again in Kingston. He felt sure he must already have seen the boy somewhere, though he could not recall a single feature. Probably he had caught a glimpse of him in London, and his subconscious mind had photographed the glimpse upon his memory. On a sudden irresistible impulse, he slowed the motor on its course, and as he passed the wayfarer, leaned out towards him.
‘We seem to be going the same way,’ he shouted above the outraged bellowings of the machine. ‘Can’t I give you a lift?’
The other looked up in surprise. Seen at such close quarters, he was more handsome than ever.
‘Oh, thank you,’ he answered after a pause. ‘Thanks very much. But I am very nearly at my destination.’