I promised to digress, Reader, and I have kept my word. Now to return to that afternoon again. It so chanced that on that day in the year I happened to have in my pocket—what you might meet me every day in five years without finding there—a ten-pound note. It was for this I felt after we had been musing awhile—Narcissus, probably, on everything else in the world except his debts—and it was with this I awoke him from his reverie. He looked at his hand, and then at me, in bewilderment. Poor fellow, how he wanted to keep it, yet how he tried to look as if he couldn't think of doing so. He couldn't help his joy shining through.
'But I want you to take it,' I said; 'believe me, I have no immediate need of it, and you can pay me at your leisure.' Ten pounds towards the keep of a poet once in a lifetime is, after all, but little interest on the gold he brings us. At last I 'prevailed,' shall I say? but on no account without the solemnity of an IOU and a fixed date for repayment, on which matter poor N. was always extremely emphatic. Alas! Mr. George Meredith has already told us how this passionate anxiety to be bound by the heaven above, the earth, and the waters under the earth, is the most fatal symptom by which to know the confirmed in this kind. Captain Costigan had it, it may be remembered; and the same solicitude, the same tearful gratitude, I know, accompanied every such transaction of my poor Narcissus.
Whether it was as apparent on the due date, or whether of that ten pounds I have ever looked upon the like again, is surely no affair of the Reader's; but, lest he should do my friend an injustice, I had better say—I haven't.
CHAPTER IV
ACCOUNTS RENDERED
Nothing strikes one more in looking back, either on our own lives or on those of others, than how little we assimilate from the greatest experiences; in nothing is Nature's apparent wastefulness of means more ironically impressive. A great love comes and sets one's whole being singing like a harp, fills high heaven with rainbows, and makes our dingy alleys for awhile bright as the streets of the New Jerusalem; and yet, if five years after we seek for what its incandescence has left us, we find, maybe, a newly helpful epithet, maybe a fancy, at most a sonnet. Nothing strikes one more, unless, perhaps, the obverse, when we see some trifling pebble-cast ripple into eternity, some fateful second prolific as the fly aphis. And so I find it all again exampled in these old accounts. The books that mean most for Narcissus to-day could be carried in the hand without a strap, and could probably be bought for a sovereign. The rest have survived as a quaint cadence in his style, have left clinging about his thought a delicate incense of mysticism, or are bound up in the retrospective tenderness of boyish loves long since gone to dream.
Another observation in the same line of reflection also must often strike one:—for what very different qualities than those for which we were first passionate do we come afterwards to value our old enthusiasms. In the day of their bloom it was the thing itself, the craze, the study, for its own sake; now it is the discipline, or any broad human culture, in which they may have been influential. The boy chases the butterfly, and thinks not of the wood and the blue heaven; but those only does the man remember, for the mark of their beauty upon him, so unconsciously impressed, for the health of their power and sweetness still living in his blood—for these does that chase seem alone of worth, when the dusty entomological relic thereof is in limbo. And so that long and costly shelf, groaning beneath the weight of Grose and Dugdale, and many a mighty slab of topographical prose; those pilgrimages to remote parish churches, with all their attendant ardours of careful 'rubbings'; those notebooks, filled with patient data; those long letters to brother antiquaries—of sixteen; even that famous Exshire Tour itself, which was to have rivalled Pennant's own—what remains to show where this old passion stood, with all the clustering foliage of a dream; what but that quaint cadence I spoke of, and an anecdote or two which seemed but of little import then, with such breathless business afoot as an old font or a Roman road?
One particular Roman road, I know, is but remembered now, because, in the rich twilight of an old June evening, it led up the gorsy stretches of Lancashire 'Heights' to a solemn plateau, wide and solitary as Salisbury Plain, from the dark border of which, a warm human note against the lonely infinite of heath and sky, beamed the little whitewashed 'Traveller's Rest,' its yellow light, growing stronger as the dusk deepened, meeting the eye with a sense of companionship becoming a vague need just then.
The seeming spiritual significance of such forlorn wastes of no-man's land had, I know, a specially strong appeal for Narcissus, and, in some moods, the challenge which they seem to call from some 'dark tower' of spiritual adventure would have led him wandering there till star-light; but a day of rambling alone, in a strange country, among unknown faces, brings a social hunger by evening, and a craving for some one to speak to and a voice in return becomes almost a fear. A bright kitchen-parlour, warm with the health of six workmen, grouped round a game of dominoes, and one huge quart pot of ale, used among them as woman in the early world, was a grateful inglenook, indeed, wherein to close the day. Of course, friend N. joined them, and took his pull and paid his round, like a Walt Whitman. I like to think of his slight figure amongst them; his delicate, almost girl-like, profile against theirs; his dreamy eyes and pale brow, surmounted by one of those dark clusters of hair in which the fingers of women love to creep—an incongruity, though of surfaces only, which certain who knew him but 'by sight,' as the phrase is, might be at a loss to understand. That was one of the surprises of his constitution. Nature had given him the dainty and dreamy form of the artist, to which habit had added a bookish touch, ending in a tout ensemble of gentleness and distinction with little apparent affinity to a scene like that in the 'Traveller's Rest.' But there are many whom a suspicion of the dilettante in such an exterior belies, and Narcissus was one of them. He had very strongly developed that instinct of manner to which sympathy is a daily courtesy, and he thus readily, when it suited him, could take the complexion of his company, and his capacity of 'bend' was well-nigh genius. Of course, all this is but to say that he was a gentleman; yet is not that in itself a fine kind of originality? Besides, he had a genuine appetite for the things of earth, such as many another delicate thing—a damask rose-bush, for example—must be convicted of too; and often, when some one has asked him 'what he could have in common with so-and-so,' I have heard him answer: 'Tobacco and beer.' Samuel Dale once described him as Shelley with a chin; and perhaps the chin accounted for the absence of any of those sentimental scruples with regard to beefsteaks and certain varieties of jokes, for which the saint-like deserter of Harriet Westbrook was distinguished.