It was at this time that Sir Selwyn received a letter from an old friend of his college days, now holding a high place in the Indian Government, reminding him of a long-promised visit, and begging him to fulfil his word without further delay.
A better invitation, thought Gaston, could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. Their pleasant English home had become charged for the baronet with associations which were wholly painful; a new scene and fresher interests would assist to push to completion the recovery which could not but be long delayed in his present situation. Sir Selwyn himself was of the same mind, and decided at once to accept his friend’s invitation.
Then arose in Gaston’s mind the question whether, in the circumstances, it were well or advisable that his father should make the journey alone. He thought it not advisable at all, and without plainly telling this to his father, begged that he might accompany him. But Sir Selwyn showed a strong reluctance to accede to this request, which was the more marked that father and son had never yet been separated on any tour of pleasure. Gaston continued to press his point, until he perceived, or thought that he perceived, what was his father’s reason for wishing to take this journey alone.
The thing which Sir Selwyn had striven for years to hide from his son he had just been forced to reveal to him. It was the sorrowful secret of his life, a secret which, to the baronet, had something of shame in it, and the revelation had been beyond measure painful to him. If, in one sense, the confession which had been wrung from him had brought father and son more closely together, it had, in another sense, placed a certain something between them of which the presence of Gaston was a constant reminder. With Gaston at his father’s side, the secret too was there. When Gaston’s delicate intuition had realised this for him, his entreaties to accompany his father were at an end. It was decided that Sir Selwyn should go to India alone, and in a fortnight from the receipt of his friend’s invitation he was on his way.
Gaston was desolate at home, and at the end of ten days or so he went to Paris, intending to stay a week there and return to England; but the weather was pleasant, and from Paris he began to wander, in leasurely[leasurely] fashion, southwards; and before he had quite made up his mind as to where he wanted to go, he found himself in Rome. Rome was chilly, and he had lighted on a bad hotel, so he remained but a few days, and went on to Naples. He would wait to see Rome, he said, until his father was with him.
After a fortnight in Naples, he was on the point of returning home, when he received a cable message from his father, forwarded with letters from England. Sir Selwyn had reached India safely and in good health, and thought it probable that his stay would be of somewhat longer duration than his arrangements on leaving England had contemplated.
The prospect of five or six solitary months in the castle in Northumberland had no relish for Gaston, so he resolved to extend his tour by an excursion to Sicily. Accordingly, he took steamer one evening from Naples to Palermo: the beautiful old city where the traces yet linger of Saracen and Norman; with the tideless sea in front, and the purple hills behind, and between the hills and the sea the little lovely plain of the Shell of Gold. Naples is beautiful, but brutal; a paradise peopled by savages: an Oriental languor softens the life of Palermo, as it tinges with melancholy the national songs; and the rural element which enters so largely into the character of the whole Sicilian people makes them something of Arcadians in a modern Arcady.
Gaston felt the charm of the place in an hour; the sense of want of companionship which had gone with him in his listless wanderings in Italy, here deserted him; he plucked ripe oranges in the garden of the hotel, and they became his lotos fruit, for he resolved that his wanderings should end in Palermo. He would remain here until his father returned from India.
But it chanced that there were few foreign visitors in Palermo that season, and within a week of Gaston’s arrival the hotel at which he stayed was emptied of all its guests, except himself and an old German baron, and the baron waited only for a steamer to take him to Malta, on his way to Egypt. An empty hotel in a foreign land is as cheerful an abode as a catacomb, and Gaston cast about for a change of quarters.
Strolling one day in a slumbrous corner of the town, where cypress trees stood sentinels at rusty iron gates, and the air smelled of lemon groves and roses, he was struck by the aspect of a tenantless and apparently deserted villa, walled within a garden, which, untended as it was, retained a certain monastic trimness. A weather-stained board over the iron gate, which was of fine workmanship, announced that the villa was to let. Gaston tried the gate, but it was locked. A broad-hatted priest who was passing at the moment, observing Gaston’s interest in the villa, stopped, took a pinch of snuff, and said that if the signor desired to have particulars of the place, he might obtain them from such a person in a street close at hand, which he indicated. Gaston thanked the father for his courtesy, and went to inquire if he could see the villa, with a view to hiring it for a short time.