In spite of the yachting, however, it was difficult to keep from being lonely at other times, especially at the chambers, because Geoffrey was out of town, taking his summer vacation, and Jack was forced to fly from the desolation in the city and pass most of his nights on the Ideal. This, with the afternoon sailing and a daily bulletin sent to Nina, addressed to Montreal, served to help him to pass away the time until the return of Geoffrey, who was greeted, as it were, with open arms. Their bachelor quarters were very homelike and comfortable. The sitting-room and library, which they shared together, always seemed a little lonely when either of them was absent.
Hampstead was pleased to get back to his luxurious arm-chair and magazines. Jack's unsuspicious and welcoming face gave the place all the restfulness of home after a period of more or less watchfulness against detection. They stretched out their legs from the arm-chairs in which they sat, and smoked and really enjoyed themselves in the old way among their newspapers and books. After having settled in New York, when he first came to America, Geoffrey had employed an old friend, on whose secrecy he could rely, to call at his father's house in Shropshire and procure for him all his old relics and curiosities. These the friend had sent out to him. Every one of them recalled some more or less interesting memory, and as they hung drying in the dust that Mrs. Priest seldom attempted to remove they were like a tabular index of Geoffrey's wanderings, on which he could cast his eyes at night and unconsciously drop back into the past. There were whips, Tartar bridles, Arab pipes and muskets, and old-fashioned firearms. No less than six cricket bats proclaimed their nationality, as an offset against the stranger trophies. There were foils and masks, boxing-gloves, fishing-rods, snow-shoes, old swords, and any quantity of what Mrs. Priest called "rotten old truck, only fit for a second-'and shop." Besides all this, there were hanging shelves, covered with cups and other prizes that Geoffrey and Jack had won in athletic contests. Even the ceiling was made to do duty in exhibiting some lances and a central trophy composed of Zulu assegais and Malay arrows and such things. These, with the large bookcases of books, and, of course, Mrs. Priest, constituted their Penates.
Here Geoffrey ensconced himself for several evenings after his return, immersed in his books until long after Jack had knocked out his last pipe and turned in. His manner of taking his holidays had been an episode which was forgotten now if anything arose to divert him, something for him to smile at, but powerless to distract his attention from a good article in the Nineteenth Century.
But he did not visit Margaret for three or four days after his return. When he saw her again, all his better nature came to the fore. He delighted again in the quiet worship he felt for her now that he could see more clearly the beauties of temperate life. "Now," he said, as he stretched himself in his arm-chair one night, after having visited Margaret earlier in the evening, "now, I will soon get married. With Margaret, goodness will not only be practicable, but, I can imagine, even enjoyable." Then, after a while, his mind recurred to his holidays, which seemed to have been a long time ago. He yawned over the subject, and thought it was time to go to bed. "Heigh-ho! I have exhausted the devil and all his works now. He has got nothing more to offer me that I care to accept. Now I have done with risks and worries. If I can only get my money affairs straightened out I'll get married in September. Federal stock is bound to rise, with the new changes in the bank, and then I'll be all right. I'll just let Lewis have my horse and trap. He'll give me more than I paid for them. The seven hundred will wipe out a few things, and then if I can turn myself round again, I'll get married at once."
For several days after this he saw Margaret; and the more he saw of her the more he really longed for the life that seemed best. He was tired of plot and counterplot. As one whose intellect was generally a discerning one, when not clouded by exciting vagaries, he had had, all his life, the idea of enjoying goodness for itself—at some time or other. And entering Margaret's presence seemed like going to a pure spring fountain from which he came away refreshed. She had the quick brain that could skim off the best of his thought and whip it up and present it in a changed and perhaps more pleasing form. Even the look of her hands, the way she held up cut flowers, and delighted in their faintest odors (to him quite imperceptible) showed how much keener and more refined her sensibilities were than his own and made him marvel to find that in some respects she lived in a world wherein it was a physical impossibility for him to enter. As the days wore on in which he daily saw her, he found himself making little sacrifices for her sake, and even practicing a trifle of self-denial. He did things that he knew would please her, and afterward he felt all the healthy glow and ability for virtue which are the essences that gracious deeds distill. "Doing these things makes me better," he said. "This moral happiness is a thing to be worked up. I can not cultivate goodness in the abstract. I must have something tangible—something to understand; and if good deeds pay me back in this sort of way I may yet become, partly through my deeds, what she would wish me to be."
Full of all this, while ruminating late one night, he took it into his head to put it into verse, and he rather liked the simple lines.
TO MARGARET.
I.
My Love! I would Love's true disciple be,
That, 'neath the king of teachers' gracious art,
Refined sense and thought might be to me
The stepping-stones to lead me to thy heart;
That thine own realm of peace I too might share.
Where Nature's smallest things show much design
To teach kind thoughts for all that breathe; and where,
As music's laws compel by rule divine,
Naught but obeying good gives joy and rest;
Where thou can'st note the immaterial scent
Of thought and thing, which we gross men at best
Can hardly know, with senses often lent
To heavy joys that leave us but to long
For that unknown which makes thyself a song.