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THE FAR HORIZON
BY
LUCAS MALET
(MRS. MARY ST. LEGER HARRISON)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_The Wages of Sin_
_A Counsel of Perfection_
_Colonel Enderby's Wife_
_Little Peter_
_The Carissima_
_The Gateless Barrier_
_The History of Sir Richard Calmady_
"Ask for the Old Paths, where is the Good Way, and walk therein, and ye
shall find rest."--JEREMIAS.
"The good man is the bad man's teacher; the bad man is the material
upon which the good man works. If the one does not value his teacher,
if the other does not love his material, then despite their sagacity
they must go far astray. This is a mystery of great import."--FROM THE
SAYINGS OF LAO-TZU.
..."Cherchons à voir les choses comme elles sont, et ne voulons pas
avoir plus d'esprit que le bon Dieu! Autrefois on croyait que la canne
à sucre seule donnait le sucre, on en tire à peu près de tout
maintenant. Il est de même de la poésie. Extrayons-la de n'importe
quoi, car elle git en tout et partout. Pas un atome de matière qui ne
contienne pas la poésie. Et habituons-nous à considerer le monde comme
un oeuvre d'art, dont il faut reproduire les procédées dans nos
oeuvres."--GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.
CHAPTER I
Dominic Iglesias stood watching while the lingering June twilight
darkened into night. He was tired in body, but his mind was eminently,
consciously awake, to the point of restlessness, and this was unusual
with him. He had raised the lower sash of each of the three tall,
narrow windows to its extreme height, since the first-floor
sitting-room, though of fair proportions, appeared close. His thought
refused the limits of it, and ranged outward over the expanse of
Trimmer's Green, the roadway and houses bordering it, to the far
northwest, that region of hurried storm, of fierce, equinoctial passion
and conflict, now paved with plaques of flat, dingy, violet cloud
opening on smoky rose-red wastes of London sunset. All day thunder had
threatened, but had not broken. And, even yet, the face of heaven
seemed less peaceful than remonstrant, a sullenness holding it as of
troops in retreat denied satisfaction of imminent battle.
Otherwise the outlook was wholly pacific, one of middle-class suburban
security. The Green aforesaid is bottle-shaped, the neck of it
debouching into a crowded westward-wending thoroughfare; while Cedar
Lodge, from the first-floor windows of which Mr. Iglesias contemplated
the oncoming of night, being situate in the left shoulder, so to speak,
of the bottle, commanded, diagonally, an uninterrupted view of the
whole extent of it. Who Trimmer was, how he came by a Green, and why,
or what he trimmed on it, it is idle at this time of day to attempt to
determine. Whether, animated by a desire for the public welfare, he
bequeathed it in high charitable sort; or whether, fame taking a less
enviable turn with him, he just simply was hanged there, has afforded
matter of heated controversy to the curious in questions of suburban
nomenclature and topography. But in this case, as in so many other and
more august ones, the origins defy discovery. Suffice it, therefore,
that the name remains, as does the open space--the latter forming one
of those minor "lungs of London" which offer such amiable oases in the
great city's less aristocratic residential districts. Formerly the
Green boasted a row of fine elms, and was looked on by discreetly
handsome eighteenth-century mansions and villas, set in spacious
gardens. But of these, the great majority--Cedar Lodge being a happy
exception--has vanished under the hand of the early Victorian
speculative builder; who, in their stead, has erected full complement
of the architectural platitudes common to his age and taste. Dignity
has very sensibly given place to gentility. Nevertheless the timid red,
or sickly yellow-grey, brick of the existing houses is pleasingly
veiled by ivy and Virginia creeper, while no shop front obtrudes
derogatory suggestion of retail trade. The local authorities, moreover,
some ten years back girdled the Green with healthy young balsam-poplar
and plane trees and enclosed the grass with iron hurdles--to rescue it
from trampling into unsightly pathways--thus doing a well-intentioned,
if somewhat unimaginative, best to safeguard the theatre of long ago
Trimmer's beneficence or infamy from greater spoliation.
Hence it follows that, certain inherent limitations admitted, the scene
upon which Dominic Iglesias' eyes rested was not without elements of
attraction. And of this fact, being a person of an excellent temperance
of expectation, he was gratefully aware. His surroundings, indeed,
constituted, so it appeared to him, the maximum of comfort and
advantage which could be expected by a middle-aged gentleman, of
moderate fortune, in the capacity of a "paying guest." Not only in word
but in thought--for in acknowledgment of obligation he was scrupulously
courteous. He frequently tendered thanks to his neighbour and old
school-fellow, Mr. George Lovegrove, first for calling his attention to
Mrs. Porcher's advertisement, and subsequently for reassuring him as to
its import. For, though incapable of forming so much as a thought to
her concrete disparagement, Mr. Iglesias was not without a quiet sense
of humour, or of that instinct of self-protection common to even the
most chivalrous of mankind. He was, therefore, perfectly sensible that
"the widow of a military officer," who describes herself in print as
"bright, musical and thoroughly domesticated," while offering "a
cheerful and refined home at the West End, within three minutes of Tube
and omnibus"--"noble dining and recreation rooms, bath h. and c."
thrown in--to unmarried members of the stronger sex, must of necessity
be a lady whose close acquaintance it would be foolhardy to make
without a trifle of preliminary scouting.
Happily not only George Lovegrove, but his estimable wife was at hand.
The latter hastened to prosecute inquiries, beginning with a visit to
the Anglican vicar of the parish, the Rev. Giles Nevington. He reported
Mrs. Porcher an evening communicant at the greater festivals, and a not
ungenerous donor to parochial charities; adding that a former curate
had resided under her roof with perfect impunity. Mrs. Lovegrove
terminated her researches by an interview with the fishmonger, who
assured her that "Cedar Lodge always took the best cuts," sternly
refused fish or poultry which had suffered cold storage, and paid its
housebooks without fail before noon on Thursday. She ascertained,
further, from a source socially intermediate between clergyman and
tradesman, that Mrs. Porcher's husband, some time veterinary surgeon of
a crack regiment, had died in the odour of alcohol rather than in that
of sanctity, leaving his widow--in addition to his numerous and heavy
debts--but a fraction of the comfortable fortune to procure the
enjoyment of which he had so considerately married her. The solid
Georgian mansion was her freehold; and it was to secure sufficient
means for continued residence in it that the poor lady started a
boarding-house, or in the politer language of the present day, had
decided to receive paying guests.
Encouraged by the satisfactory nature of the above information, Mr.
Iglesias--shortly after his mother's death, now nearly eight years
ago--had become a member of Mrs. Porcher's household. He had never, so
far, had reason to regret that step. And it was with a consciousness of
well-being and repose that he returned daily--after hours of strenuous
work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking--to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white
panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in
chimney-piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow
windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his
latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender
means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking
countries, too often goes along with these constitutes the burden and
the offence.
To-night, however, things were different. Material objects remained the
same; but the conditions of existence had taken on a strange
appearance, and with that appearance Iglesias was bound to reckon,
being uncertain as yet whether it was destined to prove that of a
friend or of an enemy. In furtherance of such reckoning, he had
declined dining at the public table, in company with his hostess, Miss
Eliza Hart, her devoted friend and companion, and the three
gentlemen--Mr. de Courcy Smyth, Mr. Farge, and Mr. Worthington--who
shared with him the hospitalities of Cedar Lodge. He had dined here,
upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, had just
finished clearing the table and departed. Usually under such
circumstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite book from the
carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small library; and,
reading again that which he had often read before, would have found
therein the satisfaction of friendship, along with the soothing
influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's _Rome_--a
handsome early edition in many volumes--_The Travels of Anacharsis_,
Evelyn's _Diary_, Napier's _Peninsular War_, John Stuart Mill's
_Logic_, Byron's _Poems_, nor those of Calderon, nor of that so-called
"prodigy of nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and immortal _Don
Quixote_ himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts, his own
life, filled his whole horizon, leaving no space for the thoughts or
lives of others. He found himself a prey to a certain mental
incoherence, a bewildering activity of vision. More than once before in
the course of his laborious, monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous
life had this same thing happened to him--the tides of the obvious and
accustomed suddenly receding and leaving him stranded, as on some
barren sand-bank, uncertain whether the ship of his individual fate
would lie there wind-swept and sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out
and planks parted, disclosing the ribs of her in unsightly nakedness,
or whether the kindly tide, rising, would float her off into blue water
and she would sail hopefully once again.
It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these
other happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the
ship of his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left
school. Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in
Holland Street, Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the
world and to obtain, it had dawned on him that there was something
strange, unhappy, and not as it was wont to be with that, to him, most
beautiful and beloved of women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy
against which his young loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the
inherent pieties of his Latin and Celtic blood, had none of that
contemptuous superiority in regard of his near relations so common to
male creatures of the Protestant persuasion and Anglo-Saxon race. He
took his parents quite seriously; it never having occurred to him that
fathers and mothers are given us merely for purposes of discipline, or
as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He was simple-minded enough
indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether beyond the bounds of
legitimate criticism--and this, as destiny would have it, with intimate
and life-long results.
Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried
exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the
fierce and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother
lived--namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the
house in the Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking
stairways, its high wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and
scampered--its clinging odour of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings,
and uneven floors. At the back of it was a narrow strip of garden,
glorious for one brief week in early summer, with the gold of a big
laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to faithful effort on the part of
the white jasmine clothing its enclosing walls. In fair weather the
morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead
for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding
deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by
cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints
surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a stone basin--in which,
after rain, sparrows disported themselves with much conversation and
fluttering of sooty wings--the garden was, to little Dominic, a place
of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings of his own fancy,
lovely or terrific, according to his passing humour. Granted a measure
of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since
the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the
dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.
His father, grave and preoccupied, whose arrivals after long periods of
absence had in them an effect of secrecy and haste, was to the small
boy a being, august, but remote. During his brief sojourns at home the
quiet house awoke to greater fulness of life, with much coming and
going of other grave personages, strange of dress, and with a certain
effect of hardly restrained violence in their aspect. A spirit of fear
seemed to enter with them, demanding an unnatural darkening of windows
and closing of doors. Before Dominic they were of few words; but became
eloquent enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears testified when
he was banished from their rather electric presence to the solitude of
the nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of mystery, of
large issues, of things at once strong and hidden, impenetrable to his
understanding and concerning which no questions might be asked,
encircled Dominic's childhood and passed into the very fabric of his
thought. While through it all his mother moved, to him tender and
wholly exquisite, but with the reticence of some deep-seated enthusiasm
silently cherished, some far-reaching alarm silently endured, always
upon her. And this resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and
responsibility which inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober
beyond his years, tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and
pitching even his laughter in a minor key.
Only many years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty
to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did
Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the
public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his
childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble
nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved
in revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type--a victim of that
false passion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest desire for
the welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against all forms of
authority. His self-confidence was colossal; all rule being abominable
to him--save his own--all rulers hideous, save himself. The anarchist,
rightly understood, is merely the autocrat, the tyrant, turned inside
out. And this man, as Dominic gathered from the perusal of those old
letters, to whom the end so justified the means that red-handed crime
took on the fair colours of virtue, his mother had loved, even while
she feared him, with all the faithfulness and pure passion of her Irish
blood. Pathetic combination, the patience and resignation of the one
ever striving to temper the flaming zeal of the other, as though the
spindrift of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the dim sadness of far
western coasts, should strive with relentless fierceness of sunglare
outpoured on some high-lying walled city of arid central Spain! Mist is
but a weak thing as against rock and fire; and what his mother must
have suffered in moral and spiritual conflict, let alone all question
of active dread, was to her son almost too cruel to contemplate,
although it explained and justified much.
In 1860, when Dominic was a schoolboy of fourteen, his father left home
on one of those sudden journeys the object and objective of which were
alike concealed. For about a year letters arrived at irregular
intervals, hailing from Paris, Naples, Prague, and finally Petersburg.
Then followed silence, broken only by rumours furtively conveyed by a
former associate, one Pascal Pelletier--an angel-faced, long-haired,
hysteric creature, inspired by an impassioned enthusiasm for infernal
machines and wholesale slaughter in theory, and, in practice, by a
gentle doglike devotion to Mrs. Iglesias and young Dominic. He would
arrive depressed and shadowy in the shadowy twilights. But, once in the
presence of the beings whom he loved, he became effervescent. His
belief was unlimited in the Head Centre, the Chief, in his demonic
power and fertility of resource. That any evil should befall
him!--Pascal snapped his thin fingers; while, with the inalienable
optimism of the born fanatic, he proceeded to state hopeful conjecture
as established fact, thereby doing homage to the spirit of delusion
which so conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost thought. But a
spell of cold weather in the winter of 1862 struck a little too
shrewdly through Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender-hearted
subverter of society to cough his life out, with all possible despatch,
in the third-floor back of a filthy lodging-house off Tottenham Court
Road.
This was the end as far as information went, whether authentic or
apocryphal. But Dominic, his horizon still bounded by the world of
school, greedy of distinction both in learning and in games, away all
day and eagerly, if somewhat sleepily, busy over the preparation of
lessons at night, was very far from realising that. Poor voluble
kind-eyed Pascal he mourned with all his heart; yet the months of his
father's absence accumulated into years almost unnoticed. The same
thing had so often happened before; and then, at an unlooked-for
moment, the wanderer had returned. Moreover, the old habit of obedience
was still strong in him. It was understood that concerning his father's
occupations and movements no comment might be made, no questions might
be asked.
Meanwhile, the small house in Holland Street was ever more still, more
unfrequented. As he grew older Dominic became increasingly sensible of
this--sensible of a sort of hush falling on him as he crossed the
threshold, so that instinctively he left much of his wholesome young
animality outside, while his voice took on softer tones in speech, and
his quick light footsteps became more scrupulously noiseless as he ran
up the little crooked stairs.
"When your father comes home we must decide what profession you shall
follow, my Dominic," it had been his mother's habit to declare. But,
even before the time for such decision arrived the boy had begun to
understand he must see to all that unaided. For his mother was ill, how
deeply and in what manner he could not tell. He shrank, indeed, from
all clear thought, let alone speech, on the subject, as from something
indelicate, in a way irreverent. Her beauty remained to her,
notwithstanding a gradual wasting as of fever. A peculiar, very
individual grace of dress and of bearing remained to her likewise. But
she was uncertain in mood, the victim of strange fancies, a being
almost alarmingly far removed from the interests of ordinary life. Long
ago, in submission to her husband's anti-clerical prejudices, she had
ceased to practise her religion, so that the services of the Church no
longer called her forth in beneficent routine of sacred obligation. Now
she never left the house, living, since poor Pascal Pelletier's death,
in complete seclusion. Little wonder then that a hush fell on Dominic
crossing the threshold, since so doing he passed from the world of
healthy action to that of acquiescent sickness, from vigorous
hoarse-voiced realities to the intangible sadness of unrelated dreams!
The effect was one of rather haunting melancholy; and it was
characteristic of the lad that he did not resent it, though rejoicing
in the reputation at school of being high-spirited enough, impatient of
restraint or of any frustration of purpose. His mother had always been
sacred. She remained so, even though her sympathies had become
imperfect, and she moved in regions which his sane young imagination
failed to penetrate. One thing was perfectly plain to him, though it
cut at the root of ambition--namely, that he could not leave her. So,
in that matter of a profession, he must find work which would permit of
his continuing to live at home; and, since her income was narrow, the
work in question must make no heavy demand in respect of preliminary
expense.
Here was a problem more easy of statement than of solution, in face of
Dominic's pride, inexperience, and the singular isolation of his
position! There followed dreary months wherein his evenings were spent
in studying and answerings advertisements; and his days, till late
afternoon, in walking the town from end to end for the interviewing of
possible employers and the keeping of fruitless appointments. He would
set forth full of hope and courage in the morning, only to return full
of the dejection of failure at night. And it was then London began to
reveal herself to him in her solidarity, under the cloud of dun-blue
coal smoke--it was wintertime--which, at once hanging over and
penetrating her immensity, adds the majesty of mystery to the majesty
of mere size. He noted how, in the chill twilights, London grew
strangely and feverishly alive. Lamps sprang into clearness along the
pavements. A dazzling glitter of shop windows marked the great
thoroughfares, while often the angry glare of a fire pulsed along the
sky-line. When night comes in the country, so Dominic told himself, the
land sinks into peaceful repose. But in cities it is otherwise. There
the light leaves heaven for earth; and walks the streets, with much
else far from celestial, until the small hours move towards the dawn
and usher in the decencies of day.
Never before had he seen London thus and understood it in all its
enormous variety, yet as a unit, a whole. How much he actually beheld
with his bodily eyes, how much through the working of a rather exalted
condition of imagination induced by loneliness and bodily fatigue, he
could never subsequently determine. But the great city presented
herself to him in the guise of some prodigious living creature,
breathing, feeding, suffering, triumphing, above all mating and
breeding, terrible in her power and vitality, age old, yet still
unspent. Presented herself to him as horribly prolific, ever outpassing
her own unwieldy limits, sending forth her children, year after year,
all the wide world over by shipping or by rail; receiving some tithe of
them back, proud with accomplished fortune to enhance her glory, or,
disgraced and broken, slinking homeward to the cover of her fog and
darkness merely to swell the numbers of the nameless who rot and die.
He thought of those others, too--and this touched his young ardour with
a quick shudder of personal fear--whom she never sends forth at all;
but holds close in bondage all their lives long, enslaved to her
countless and tyrant activities by their own poverty, or by their
fellow-creatures' misfortune, cruelties, and sins. Was it thus she was
going to deal with him, Dominic Iglesias? Was he to be among the great
city's bondmen through the coming years, better acquainted with the
very earthly light which walks her streets by night, than with the
heavenly light which gladdens the sweet face of day in the open country
and upon the open sea? And for a moment the boy's heart rebelled,
hungry for pleasure, hungry for wide experience, hungry even for
knowledge of those revolutionary intrigues which, as he was beginning
to understand, had surrounded his childhood, and, as he was beginning
to fear, had cost his mother her reason and his father both liberty and
life. Thus did the ship of poor Dominic's fate appear to be stranded or
ever it had fairly set sail at all.
Meanwhile, if London claimed him, she did so in very cynical fashion,
mocking his willingness to labour, refusing to feed him even while she
refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him--his
youth, his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of
giving definite information regarding his father's past occupations or
present whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely
hands and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic
colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech--all these marked him as
unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer
of labour--of whatever sort--has, it must be conceded, but little use.
He is half afraid, half contemptuous of it, instinctively disliking
anything more alert and alive than his own most stolid self. But while
men, distrusting the distinctness of his personality and his good
looks, refused to give Dominic work, women, relishing them, were only
too ready to give him enjoyment--of a kind. The boy, in those solitary
wanderings, ran the gauntlet of many temptations; and was
presented--did he care to accept it--with the freedom of the city on
very liberal lines. Happily, inherent cleanliness of nature saved him
from much; and reverent shame at the thought of entering the hushed and
silent house where his mother lived--spotless, amid pathetic memories
and delicate dreams--with the soil of licence upon him, saved him from
more. Crime might have come close to him in his childhood, but vice
never; and the influences of vice are far more insidious, and
consequently more damaging, than those of crime.
Still, one way and another, the boy came very near touching the
confines of despair. Then the tide rose and the stranded ship of his
fate began to lift a little. By means of a series of accidents--the
illness of his former school-fellow, the already mentioned George
Lovegrove, whose post he offered temporarily to fill--he drifted into
connection with the banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking. There his knowledge of modern languages, his industry, and a
certain discreet aloofness commended him to his superiors. A minor
clerkship fell vacant; it was offered to him. And from thenceforth, for
Dominic Iglesias, the monotony of fixed routine and steady labour,
until the day when, as a man of past fifty, restless and somewhat
distrustful both of the present and the future, he watched the dying of
the sullen sunset over Trimmer's Green from the windows of the
first-floor sitting-room of Cedar Lodge.