“Are you satisfied now, Silas, are you satisfied?” Silas kept mumbling
to himself later as with haste he tore his clothes off in the dark.
He would tell Lady Malleson—tell her that he had wantonly thrown out his
own son. What would she think of that? Once she had said he was
terrible; he hoped that she would say it again. The words had crowned
him with a rare reward. Surely he had earned their repetition?
He scrambled into his bed; lay there with his muscles jerking. He
tautened them, trying to keep them still, but could not. Martin, yes;
he had thrown out Martin. That was a resolute thing to do. It was all
of a piece with what had gone before; Hannah had ministered to his
comfort; in a rough and ready way, it was true, often more rough than
ready; but still she had ministered; and Hannah, along with his
personal comfort and convenience, had been sacrificed when necessity
dictated. (If he chose to consider in the light of a necessity the
suspicion of an outrage upon his own sensitive dignity which another
man might have dismissed as negligible, even inevitable, that was his
own business; nobody else’s.) Hannah had gone. Now Hannah’s son, for a
quick, intuitive suspicion of his father, had gone too—thrown out to
founder, possibly, though the sequel was now no concern of Silas’s;
Martin was proud, Martin would not return, least of all to appeal for
help. Lying awake in the night that to him was no more deeply night
than midday, Silas fought his regret for Martin. Martin had come, his
memory rich with what garnered tales of peril? he had led a hunter’s
life among red men, bony, painted, feathered men; he had tracked
wounded beasts, either great-horned or soft-footed; he had dared the
great solitudes, blazed his way through forests, and taken his chance
of the rapids; with all this, Martin, a fine young man, would have
beguiled his father’s ears and opened new horizons to his insatiable
fancy. Bringing all this with him, like a pedlar’s pack, Martin had
tramped along the dyke from Spalding; no doubt with a certain pitiful
eagerness he made his way home from the incredible distance of that
rough primitive world. Tears forced themselves out from Silas’s
sightless eyes. He had never wept for Hannah, he had hated Hannah,
even when through her death she became, poor woman, an object of
satisfaction to his insecure vanity; an object, too, of allurement to
his prowling cowardice. But for Martin he wept, for Martin and all
that Martin stood for. Then envy shook him, that Martin, free, young,
keen-sighted, and, above all, fearless,—fearlessness was the only true
freedom,—should be returning to that worthy life, in more ways than
one a hunter of big game. Big game! to the simple, eager nature all
life was big game. The actual quarry; the stake in a hazardous
enterprise; the test of endurance; or the interlude of women,—all that
was big game; a big, audacious, masculine game. The hint, the mere
passing suggestion, of enterprise acted as a sufficient stimulant,
under which his imagination flamed at once as a torch, widening a
bright, lit space in the darkness, populating it with figures full of
splendour, heroically proportioned. He reached out to another and more
ardent life, away from the security in which he so carefully preserved
himself. He was pierced through by the sheer valour of man, as a shaft
of light might on a sudden have pierced his darkness. He beheld man,
small, imperfect, but dauntless; sustained by a spirit of
extraordinary intrepidity, intent upon the double mastery of his
planet and of his own soul; man, stern against his own weakness,
checked here and thwarted there by the inner treachery of his own
heart, foiled in his ambitions, cast down from such summits as he had
attained, but ever fighting forward in the pursuit of an end perhaps
undistinguishable, to which the path of conquest, so difficult, so
jeopardous, was in itself a measure of recompense. So he was blind, as
blind as Silas himself; the more honourable because, despite his
blindness, he still wrought undeterred.
How various were his pursuits, his methods of conquest! to maintain and
advance himself in the supreme captaincy; so diverse the images of
vigour which the labourer in his activity was too simple to suspect.
There were men who wrested from the earth the last guarded secrets,
pitting their limbs against forest, mountain, ice, or waterless plain;
only their soft limbs against the giant sentries of unhandseled nature;
those who scored the monotonous sea with the rich and coloured roads of
commerce, heaping in the harbours of the world the strangeness of
cargoes, always strange because always exotic; those who tilled the
responsive soil; the hunters, the fighters, and the princes; others who,
living their true life, sequestered and apart by reason of their austere
calling, through a patience so immense that the profound darkness of the
mysteries with which it dealt was punctuated by reward of fresh light
only here and there along the wide-spaced generations, gained fragment
by fragment the knowledge of the ordering of distant worlds; the women
who bore the burden of fresh lives,—he could feel himself alien to none
of these, neither to the law-givers nor the law-breakers; the
acquiescent nor the rebellious; no, nor the spare anchorite who aspired
through lonely frugality and penance towards the same summit of
domination; he stretched out his hand, alike to king and prostitute, and
with the falling strove still to uplift the tattered standard, and with
the multitude of the triumphant marched upon the road of pride. All this
he saw with a clarity, a wholeness that was in the nature of actual
beholding far more than of the blurred confusion of a vision. He had his
landscape under sharp sunlight, precision of detail allying itself with
breadth of horizon. He saw, too, skulking in and out amongst the
pageantry rich with legend that went its way under windy banners, he saw
dark, puny, ignoble figures; not one of them bore the tool of an honest
craft, but small forked tongues darted between their lips; and in his
abasement he included himself in their number, and questioned whether
the rest of them, damned spirits, worshipped in secret, as he did, the
magnificence they must envenom because they could not share?