"Unfortunately, yes. But you must arrange to spend a day, or at any rate an evening, with me in town before my leave expires. Are you thinking of taking up your residence at Hatton Towers?"
Paul made a gesture of indecision. "It is a lovely old place," he said; "but I feel that I need to be in touch with the pulse of life, if I am to diagnose its ailments. Latterly London has become distasteful to me; it seems like a huge mirror reflecting all the horrors, the shams, the vices of the poor scarred world. To retire to Hatton in the companionship of Yvonne would be delightful, but would also be desertion. No idle chance brought us together to-day, Don; it was that Kismet to which the Arab ascribes every act of life. I was hesitating on a brink; you pushed me over; and at this very hour I am falling into the arms of Fate. I believe it is my appointed task to sow the seed of truth; a mighty task, but because at last I realise its dimensions I begin to have confidence that I may succeed."
Don stood still in the road, facing Paul. "Choose your seed with care, Paul, for generations yet unborn will eat of its fruit."
V
Paul Mario dined alone in the small breakfast-room overlooking the sloping lawns, waited upon by Davison, the late Sir Jacques' butler, a useful but melancholy servant, having the demeanour of a churchwarden and a habit of glancing rapidly under tables and chairs as though he had mislaid a cassock or a Book of Common Prayer. The huge, gloomy dining-room oppressed the new owner of Hatton Towers, being laden with the atmosphere of a Primitive Methodist Sunday School.
Sir Jacques had been Paul's maternal uncle, and Paul had often wondered if there could have been anything in common between his mother—whom he had never known—and this smug Pharisee. His father, who had died whilst Paul was at Oxford, had rarely spoken of Paul's mother; but Paul had chanced to overhear an old clubman refer to her as having possessed "the most fascinating ankles in London." The remark had confirmed his earlier impression that his mother had been a joyous butterfly. For his father, a profound but sombre scholar, he cherished a reverence which was almost Roman in its character. His portrait in oils occupied the place of honour in Paul's study, and figuratively it was a shrine before which there ever burned the fires of a deathless love and admiration.
Paul's acute response to environment rendered him ill at ease in Hatton Towers. The legacy embarrassed him. He hated to be so deeply indebted to a man he could never repay and from whom he would not willingly have accepted the lightest favour. It has been truly said that the concupiscence of the eye outlives desire. Tiberius succumbed to premature senility (and was strangled by Macro) in a bedchamber decorated with figures from the works of Elephantis; and Sir Jacques' secret library, which he had omitted to destroy or disperse, bore evidence to the whited sepulchre of his intellectual life.
This atmosphere was disturbing. Paul could have worked at Hatton Towers, but not upon the mighty human theme with which at that hour his mind was pregnant. For his intellect was like a sensitive plate upon which the thoughts of those who had lived and longed and died in whatever spot he might find himself, were reproduced eerily, almost clairvoyantly. It was necessary that he should work amid sympathetic colour—that he should appropriately set the stage for the play; and Fame having coming to him, not empty-handed but laden with gold, he made those settings opulent.
He did spontaneously the things that lesser men do at behest of their press-agents. The passionate mediaeval tragedy Francesca of the Lilies, destined to enshrine his name in the temple of the masters, he wrote at the haunted Palazzo Concini in Tuscany, where, behind tomb-like doors, iron-studded and ominous, he worked in a low-beamed windowless room at a table which had belonged to Gilles de Rais, and by light of three bronze lamps found in the ruins of the Mamertine dungeons.
For company he had undying memories of sins so black that only the silent Vatican archives held record of them; memories of unholy loves, of deaths whose manner may not be written, of births whereat the angels shuddered. Torch-scarred walls and worm-tunnelled furniture whispered their secrets to him, rusty daggers confessed their bloody histories, and a vial still bearing ghastly frost of Borgian contarella spoke of a virgin martyr and of a princely cardinal whose deeds were forgotten by all save Mother Church. Paul's genius was absorbent, fructiferous, prolific of golden dreams.