XX
THE RETURN
Through the soft summer seas the great ship moved into the mouth of the English Channel. The early dawn had revealed the faint mist-folded promontories of the Cornish coast well to westward. Red-sailed fishing-boats hung like a flight of birds upon the lucid floors of ocean; coasting steamers snorted past with an air of insular importance; here and there a white-sailed brig glimmered in the early sunlight; and, coming after the long loneliness of open seas, these signs of life impressed the mind like the stir and tumult of a city. Plymouth would be reached by noon.
Letters, telegrams, and papers had already come aboard with the pilot—the first friendly overtures of a land slowly rising out of the thinning morning bank. Men and women, with laughing eyes and gladdened faces, stood in little groups reading their correspondence, exchanging jests, commenting upon scraps of news which they had gathered from the papers. It seemed the tide of war had turned at last. It was to a madly joyous land the great ship made its slow approach. Suddenly upon the deck the band clashed with the animating music of the National Anthem. The English stood uncovered as the first familiar bar vibrated on the quiet air; the Americans watched them with a half-sympathetic amusement; even the steerage passengers, foreigners for the most part, without part or lot in British victories, smiled cheerfully. So joyous was the hour that private grief appeared a contradiction, an impertinence.
There was neither telegram nor letter for Arthur, and he had been unable to secure a paper. To him England extended no welcome.
During the long trans-continental journey, and the longer ocean voyage, he had beaten out all the conditions of his situation with an iteration that had finally exhausted the possibilities of vehement emotion. It is happily not within the power of the human organism to feel and suffer intensely except for short periods; agony begets lethargy. It is one of the mercies of pain that it thus dies of its own excess, that in its intensity it becomes coma. Arthur had reached the point of moral coma. The red-hot iron had ploughed through his soul, but it had also seared it into brief insensibility.
In his first extremity of consternation it had seemed a thing impossible to survive the horror that possessed him. The image of his father rose before him, sad-browed, accusing, spent with mortal struggle, pale with immortal defeat—it travelled with him like a face painted in the air. It evoked in him an anguish of commiseration, and even of remorse. He remembered every slighting thought that he had cherished, as men recollect wrongs done to the dead, magnifying errors into cruelties, faults into crimes. With a sudden burning of the blood he had realised how singular and strong is that bond of flesh which unites the parent to the child, how sacred and how incapable of all annulment. At the root of his own life lay a force stronger than justice, stronger than religion, a thing bare, irrational, primeval—the awful sanctity of kinship. And he knew in that moment that, for good or ill, his place was beside his father. There he must needs stand, even though it were at the gallows' foot. Whatever burden crushed those strong shoulders he must share, even though the load were shameful. From that obligation there was no discharge.
From New York he had cabled both to his father and to Bundy, but no reply had come from either. He had had to wait two days for the sailing of a ship, the first of which was a day of infinite misery, aimless wandering, languid revisitation of familiar scenes. On the second day he met Horner. He found the little artist re-established in his studio, and from him received a boisterous welcome.
"Have you seen my book?" he cried.