He spoke with constraint, but he spoke like a man, and Basset owned his equality while he resented it. He felt that he ought to renew his offer of hospitality, but he could not—reserve and shyness had him again in their grip. He muttered something about thinking it over, added a word or two of thanks—which were cut short by the flickering out of the candle—and a minute later he was in the dark deserted street, and walking back to his inn—not over well content with himself, if the truth be told.
Either he should not have gone, he felt, or he should have gone the whole way, sunk his ideas of caste, and carried the thing through. What was it to him if the man was going to marry a servant?
But that was a detail. The main point was that he should not have gone. It had been a foolish impulse—he saw it now—which had taken him to the barber’s shop; and one which he might have known that he would repent. He ought to have foreseen that he could not place himself on Colet’s level without coming into collision with him; that he could not draw wisdom from him without paying toll.
An impossible person, he thought, a man of ideas quite unlike his own! And yet the man had spoken well and ably, and spoken from experience. He had told the things that he had seen as he passed from house to house, hard, sad facts, the outcome of rising numbers and falling wages, of over-production, of mouths foodless and unwanted. And all made worse, as he maintained, by this tax on bread, that barely touched the rich man’s income, yet took a heavy toll from the small wage.
As he recalled some of the things that he had heard, Basset felt his interest revive. Colet had dealt with facts; he had attempted no oratory, he had cast no glamour over them. But he had brought to bear upon them the light of an ideal—the Christian ideal of unselfishness; and his hearer, while he doubted, while he did not admit that the solution was practical, owned its beauty.
For he too, as we know, had had his aspirations, though he had rarely thought of turning them into action. Instead, he had hidden them behind the commonplace; and in this he had matched the times, which were commonplace. For the country lay in the trough of the wave. Neither the fine fury of the generation which had adored the rights of man, nor the splendid endurance which the great war had fostered, nor the lesser ardors of the Reform era, which found its single panacea in votes, touched or ennobled it. Great wealth and great poverty, jostling one another, marked a material age, seeking remedies in material things, despising arms, decrying enthusiasm; an age which felt, but hardly bowed as yet, to the breath of the new spirit.
But Basset—perhaps because the present offered no great prospect to the straitened squire—had had his glimpses of a life higher and finer, devoted to something above the passing whim and the day’s indulgence, a life that should not be useless to those who came after him. Was it possible that he now heard the call? Could this be the crusade of which he had idly dreamed? Had the trumpet sounded at the moment of his utmost need?
If only it were so! During the evening he had kept his sorrow at bay as well as he could, distracting his thoughts with passing objects. Now, as the boots ushered him up the close-smelling stairs to the inn’s best room, and he stood in his hat and coat, looking on the cold bare aspect and the unfamiliar things—he owned himself desolate. The thought of Mary, of his hopes and plans and of the end of these, returned upon him in an irresistible flood. The waters which he had stemmed all day, though all day they had lapped his lips, overwhelmed him with their bitterness. Mary! He had loved her and she—he knew what she thought of him.
He could not take up the old life. She had made an end of that, the rather as from this time onward the Gatehouse would be closed to him by her presence. And the old house near Wootton where he had been wont to pass part of his time? That hardly met his needs or his aspirations. Unhappy as he was, he could not see himself sitting down in idleness, to brood and to rust in a home so remote, so quiet, so lost among the stony hills that the country said of it,
“Wootton under Weaver
Where God came never!”