BENJAMIN LEVY RUNS HIS QUARRY TO EARTH
The slumberous afternoon wore slowly away. A slight breeze rustled
amongst the cypresses and the olive trees, and the air grew clearer. The
sun was low in the heavens, and long shadows lay across the brilliant
patches of flowers, half wild, half cultivated, and on the moss-grown
walks.
Still Bernard Maddison made no movement. It may have been that he shrunk
from what was before him, or it may have been that he had some special
purpose in thus calling up those broken visions of the past into his
mind. For, as he sat there, they still thronged in upon him, disjointed
and confused, yet all tinged with that peculiar sadness which seemed to
have lain heavy upon his life.
Again the memory of those long lonely days of his boyhood stole in upon
him. He thought of that terrible day when his father stood by his
bedside, and had bidden him in an awful voice ask no more for his
mother, and think of her only as dead; and he remembered well the chill
of cold despair with which he had realized that that fair, sweet woman,
who had called him her little son, and who had accepted his devoted
boyish affection with a sort of amused pleasure, was gone from him for
ever. Henceforth life would indeed be a dreary thing, alone with that
cold, silent student, with whom he was almost afraid to speak, and whom
he scarcely ever addressed by the name of father.
A dreary time it had indeed been. His memory glanced lightly over the
long monotonous years with a sort of shuddering recoil. He thought of
his father's frequent absences, and of his return from one of them in
the middle of a winter's night, propped up in an invalid carriage, with
a surgeon in attendance, and blood-stained bandages around his leg. And
he thought of a night when he had sat up with him while the nurse
rested, and one name had ceaselessly burst from those white feverish
lips, laden with fierce curses and deep vindictive hate, a name which
had since been written into his memory with letters of fire. Further and
further on his memory dragged him, until he himself, a boy no longer,
had stood upon the threshold of man-hood, and on one awful night had
heard from his father's lips that story which had cast its shadow across
his life. Then for the first time had sprung up of some sort of sympathy
between them, sympathy which had for its foundation a common hatred, a
common sense of deep, unpardonable wrong. The oath which his father had
sworn with trembling lips the son had echoed, and in dread of the
vengeance of these two, the man against whom they had sworn it cut
himself off from his fellows, and skulked in every out-of-the-way corner
of Europe, a hunted being in peril of his life. There had come a great
change over their lives, and they had drifted farther apart again. He
himself had gone out into the world something of a scholar and something
of a pedant, and he had found that all his ideas of life had lain
rusting in his country home, and that he had almost as much to unlearn
as to learn. With ample means, and an eager thirst for knowledge, he had
passed from one to another of the great seats of learning of the world.
But his lesson was not taught him at one of them. He learned it not
amongst the keen conflict of intellect at the universities, not in the
toils of the great vague disquiet which was throbbing amongst all
cultured and artistic society, but in the eternal silence of Mont Blanc
and her snow-capped Alps, and the whisperings of the night winds which
blew across the valleys. At Heidelberg he had been a philosopher, in
Italy he had been a scholar, and in Switzerland he became a poet. When
once again he returned to the more feverish life of cities he was a
changed man. He looked out upon life now with different eyes and
enlarged vision. Passion had given place to a certain studied calm, a
sort of inward contemplativeness which is ever inseparable from the true
artist. Life became for him almost too impersonal, too little human.
Soon it threatened to become one long abstraction, accompanied
necessarily with a weakened hold on all sensuous things, and a
corresponding decline in taste and appreciation. One thing had saved him
from relapsing into the nervous dreamer, and the weaver of bright but
aimless fancies. He had loved, and he had become a man again, linked to
the world and the things of the world by the pulsations of his passion
and his strong deep love. Was it well for him or ill, he wondered. Well,
it might have been save for the deadly peril in which he lived, and
which seemed closing fast around him. Well, it surely would have
been....
Lower and lower the sun had sunk, till now its rim touched the horizon.
The evening breeze stealing down from the hills had gathered strength
until now it was almost cold. The distant sound of footsteps, and the
gay laughing voices of the promenaders from the awakening town broke the
deep stillness which had hung over the garden and recalled Bernard
Maddison from thoughtland. He rose to his feet, a little stiff, and
walked slowly along the path towards the villa. At that same moment, Mr.
Benjamin Levy, tired and angry with his long waiting, stole into the
garden by the postern-gate.