CHAPTER XX—“OH, WHITE DOVE OF THE PITY DIVINE”
But a few minutes had passed since Usher's departure; yet to Sylvester they represented a great chasm of time,—a living self on the one side, a dead self on the other. He walked aimlessly about the room in a curious apathy. That which had been vital to him, his love and reverence for those two,—father and mother,—had been plucked away from him, and it seemed merely some reflex action that maintained organic existence.
On the wall facing the fireplace were two companion water-colour portraits in old-fashioned oval frames. He paused before them and looked dully from one to the other. These had been his sacred images in the house, the ikons of his gods. His mother smiled down upon him. Her hair, banded obliquely on either side over her forehead, gave an idea of Madonna-like purity to the delicate contours of her face. That of Botticelli's fair girl-mother betrayed less a soul at war with itself. And it was not the artist's contemporaneous delight in investing feminine portraiture with angelic sentimentality that was at fault. The son remembered her thus in the flesh, though older,—a rare, flower-like woman, with hands that, when they touched him as a boy, seemed holy. She was dead. That other, the young man bright and strong, looking unflinchingly at the world over his absurd black neckcloth, was now an old man, dying. And all that they left was a heritage of shame.
Their lives had been a hollow, hideous lie,—the lives of his gods. A fortiori, the lives of common mortality were false. He seemed to stand apart from the world, dispassionately regarding a race corrupt to its core, and shrinking from the step that would bring him again into its midst. Without Phariseeism he appeared to be the one clean man in a miry universe; the sense whereof brought with it something of the appalling. Whither should he turn without rubbing against contamination?
He moved away from the pictures and looked about the room. The familiar, old-fashioned furniture, which the old man loved to keep in memory of her who was once queen of the little space, seemed tainted with the unutterable. He became aware of a physical feeling of nausea. The room reeked. He flung open one of the French windows with an instinctive craving for a breath of the cold December air that was blown across the dripping lawn.
He brushed aside his hair, and tried to think. He stood as a judge; that he realised. Those two were brought before the bar, accused of the sin that his organic temperament pronounced unforgivable. The pleas in extenuation would be weakness and folly; and weakness and folly he despised. He was called upon to pass sentence for the shame of which he himself was the child; and in passing it on the sinful pair he was condemning himself to a living death. The man did not see that he had been working all his life towards this doom.
The slamming of the door behind him caused him to turn round with a start. His Aunt Agatha came towards him, wrapping a woollen shawl tightly around her lean shoulders.
“Oh, how can you have the windows open on a day like this?” she asked shivering.
He closed the window in silence and looked at her inquiringly.