THE LOOSENED GRIP.
"Bladud, the son of Lud, founded this Bath three hundred years before
Christ."
It was a far cry from Bladud to Nicholas Jardine! A goodly span, too,
from the time when a great statesman was carried through the streets of
Bath, swathed in flannels; his livid face, peering through the windows
of the sedan chair, the fierce eyes staring from beneath his powdered
wig. One can almost see his ghost in Milsom Street, and hear the
whisper spread from group to group: "There he goes! the great Commoner,
Mr. Pitt!"
And now through the streets of the same town they wheeled a very
different sort of statesman; and yet, perhaps, the product, by slow
processes of inevitable evolution, of that very time "when America
thrust aside the British sceptre, when the ingenious machine of Dr.
Guillotine removed the heads of King and Queen in France, when Ireland
rose in rebellion, when Napoleon grasped at the dominion of the Western
World, when Wellington fought the French Marshals in Spain," and when,
God be thanked! Nelson triumphed in Trafalgar Bay.
Just as the inhabitants and visitors of Bath used to take off their
hats to William Pitt in his sedan chair, so now the new generation
saluted Nicholas Jardine, when, seated in his bath-chair, he was
drawn through the streets to the baths. For though times were changed,
the President in his way was a great personage--such a remarkably
successful man; and in all times it has been proved true that
nothing succeeds like success. Jardine, when he acknowledged these
salutations, showed an awkwardness unknown to those to the Manor born.
It disconcerted him to be stared at, especially now that he was ill.
He hated traversing the public streets, and often sat with closed
eyes until his chair entered the bathing establishment. Once there he
became alert and interested--but not in the reminiscences of Georgian
functions and the manners and customs of the fops and flirts of that
vanished period. What appealed to him, as a trained mechanic, was the
heritage of far remoter days. The brain of the Roman Engineer and the
skilled hand of the Roman Architect and Mason had left these signs and
wonders for future generations to look upon. The great rectangular
bath had only been uncovered about sixty years earlier. The Goths and
Vandals of an earlier period had built over it their trumpery shops
and dwelling-houses. But the present bath, with its modern additions,
actually was built upon the ancient piers. The very pavements, or
scholæ, that bordered it were those which the Roman bathers had
trod. The recesses or exedræ corresponded with those at Pompeii, and
had been used for hanging the clothes of the Roman bathers or for
resting places. The floor of the bath was coated with lead, and in all
probability that lead was brought from the Roman mines in the Mendip
Hills, where had been discovered the imperial emblems of Claudius and
Vespasian.
The President was not without a sense of the beautiful. The scene
around him awakened his imagination. He knew that the wooded slopes
of the stately hills, the stone hewn from the inexhaustible quarries,
and the broad river--formerly spanned by bridges and aqueducts graceful
in outline and noble in proportions--each and all had furnished the
means which skilful hands had put to glorious uses. Yet all these
ingredients of beauty might have remained unused but for the wonderful
thermal waters which here, for untold centuries, had risen ceaselessly
from fathomless depths, streaming ever from rocky fissures, filling the
pools and natural basins, and still overflowing into the rushing river.
But this beneficent spring and these now verdant hills must have had
their remote origin in some terrible concussion of natural forces.
Mother Earth had laboured and brought them forth, far back in her
pre-historic ages. Subterranean fires, begotten by the portentous union
of iron and sulphur, had waited their appointed time. Drop after drop,
the hidden waters had filtered on inflammable ingredients, until the
imprisoned air at last exploded, and the earth, rending and rocking in
appalling convulsions, opened enormous chasms and brought forth, amid
fire and smoke and vapour, the embryo of all this lovely scene. The
City was the offspring of seismic action; the earth had travailed and
brought forth these wooded hills. The smiling valley, where now stood
the City, was but the crater of an extinct volcano, perpetuated in
memory by the steaming waters that still gushed upward from the mystic
depths.
Below the streets and houses of the modern town were the original baths
of the City of Sulcastra, of many acres in extent. Here, indeed, in
this most wonderful of Spas, history unfolded itself page by page--the
City of Sul in the grip, successively, of Roman, Saxon, Dane; dynasty
succeeding dynasty, sovereign coming after sovereign, statesman after
statesman, until now, when a Walsall mechanic in a bath-chair was all
that England had to show by way of substitute for absolute sovereignty
and sceptred sway.
And with Nicholas Jardine, too, the relentless law of time was at work.
The sceptre was falling from his grasp. The grass withereth; the flower
fadeth. Man passes to his long home, and the mourners go about the
street. Would it be his turn next? Every day Zenobia seemed to see in
her father's face signs of a slowly working change. She witnessed the
melancholy spectacle of waning strength, of failing interest in those
things that once had absorbed his thoughts and energies. It wrought in
her a corresponding change, a protective tenderness which she had never
felt before, a deepening sense of the transience and sadness of human
pomp and circumstance, a broadened sympathy with all the sons of men.
A great silence seemed to have fallen upon the man who in the past had
made so many speeches. A brooding wistfulness revealed itself in his
expression. There was a haunting look of doubt or question in his eyes,
a look as of one who, without compass and without rudder, finds himself
drifting on an unknown sea. The land was fading from his sight. The
solid earth on which he had walked, self-confident, self-sufficient,
no longer gave him foothold. His nerveless hands were losing grip on
the only life of which he knew anything, the only life in which he had
been able to believe. And day by day, and night by night, there came to
his mind the memory of his earlier life, of the faith that he had seen
shining in the dying eyes of the woman who had believed while he had
disbelieved. Vividly he recalled to mind--albeit with a sense of wonder
and irritation--an occasion when he had sat beside her in the old
Cathedral at Lichfield. The sun was setting, and its glory illumined
the huge western window; the words of the great man of action, who was
also the man of great faith, were being read from the lectern, and at
a certain passage his wife had turned and looked at him with sad and
supplicating eyes: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are
of all men most miserable."
If in this life only ...! All other hope he had scorned and rejected.
No other hope had seemed needful to his happiness and success. But
now? Already _this_ life was dwindling and departing. He felt it; he
knew it in his inmost being, as his steps faltered, his hands grew
thin and pallid, and his brain, once so busy with a hundred projects
and ambitions, now refused to work, or brought to him only recurrent
recollections of things which in the prime and strength of his manhood
he had scouted and despised.
If in this life only ...!
Sometimes a great restlessness possessed him, and Zenobia, in the
silent watches of the night, heard him moving heavily and slowly about
his room. On one of these nights, anxious and alarmed, she hurried in
and found him standing at the window in the darkness. The furnished
house they occupied was on Bathwick Hill, and the night scene from the
windows was one of striking mystery and beauty. The blackness of the
valley in which lay the ancient city, and of the towering hills on
every side, was studded with myriads of lights--shining like stars in
an inverted firmament.
"Father!"
She crossed the room and laid her hand upon his arm; but, scarcely
heeding her, the sick man still stood by the window, looking as if
fascinated on the magical scene of the night. Zenobia also gazed, and
gazed steadfastly; but the impression made upon herself was wholly
different. With him it was a sad impression of farewell. But in
Zenobia's brain there suddenly sprang up an extraordinary sense of
recognition. There was a subtle, haunting familiarity in the scene she
looked upon--this valley and these hills, in and about which all that
was modern, save the lights, was quite invisible. Thus might the valley
of Sulcastra have looked under the darkened sky two thousand years
ago. Thus might the lamps of Roman villas, temples, baths, and public
buildings have twinkled when a vestal virgin, maintaining Sul's undying
fires upon the altar, looked down upon the silent city.
The puzzled girl caught her breath, half sighing, unable to shake off
the belief that at some remote period she had gone through precisely
the same experience that was now presented to her. And, doubly strange,
in connection with the scene, though she could see no reason for it,
her thoughts flew instantly to Linton Herrick. She became oppressed,
almost suffocated, with a sense as of pre-existence--a bewildering
sensation, almost a revelation--that seemed to tell of the mystery of
the ego, of the indestructibility of human life.
* * * * *
It was the last time that Nicholas Jardine looked down upon the old
city, by night or by day. The next day he remained in bed, and the day
after, and all the days that were left to him. The afternoon sunshine
came upon the walls, the shadows followed, night succeeded day. The
demarcations of time became blurred. His calendar was growing shorter
and shorter. The world mattered less and less to him, who had played a
leading part in it; and already he mattered nothing to the world. Death
was not close at hand. Nevertheless he was dying.
"For this losing is true dying:
This is lordly man's down-lying:
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning."