"My Dear Lavirotte,
"I cannot tell you how deeply grieved we both were to hear the
occasion of your flight from Milan. Your landlady, Maria, told me the
sad news. I was, indeed, greatly shocked and grieved to hear it. We
can easily understand how it was, in the first terrible moment of your
affliction, you should not care to come near even us. But I cannot
help wishing that by some accident or another it had so chanced I left
Milan by the train that took you away, though I might not be allowed
to intrude upon you in the journey.
"My dear Lavirotte, I know as well as anyone that under occasions of
this kind words of consolation are generally outrages. My whole object
in writing this letter is simply to say how sorry I am that I am not
with you, and how sorry we both are for the cause which took you away.
"I am _sure_ the best thing you can do, under the circumstances, is to
come back here as quickly as ever you can. Do not lose a moment. I am
altogether thinking of you, and not of the desire either of us has to
see you. To show you I am in earnest in this, if you tell me you will
come, I will promise never to go near you until you give me leave. It
is the commonest of commonplaces, but it is one of the truest, that
hard work is the best way of occupying time, when time is bitter or
heavy. My dear Lavirotte, come back and plunge headlong into work. We
will not trouble you. When you wish to see us you know where to find
us. I will not now say any more, except what you well know already,
that our hearts are, and always will be, with you.
"Yours as ever,
"Eugene O'Donnell."
When Lavirotte finished reading this letter he fell into a long
reverie. With head depressed and slow steps, he passed down Cheapside,
Newgate Street, and over the Viaduct. A couple of hours ago it seemed
to him his mind was made up beyond the possibility of change. And now
he was not thinking of change. He was not thinking at all, but
allowing to drift slowly across his imagination a long panorama of
that future which he had resolved to abandon.
He saw once more the life at Milan, the life he had been leading, the
life Eugene would continue to lead for a while longer. He saw the
moment when Eugene would finally take leave of that city and come
northward, perfected in his art.
He saw Eugene's arrival in London, with such good words for heralds as
made him sought after in his profession. He saw obsequious managers
with Eugene, flattering him, coaxing him, pressing him to accept
splendid engagements. He saw the admiring faces at the private trial
of Eugene's voice. He saw the smiles of delight, the hands that
applauded. He saw the flush of triumph upon Eugene's face, Eugene's
bows of acknowledgment. And behind all, he saw Nellie.
He saw her radiant, transfigured, divine, sitting apart, isolated from
all by the exquisite delicacy of her beauty, the exquisite delicacy of
her love, the exquisite delicacy of her spirit. He saw the glance that
shot from Eugene's faithful eyes to hers. He saw that in that room,
that hall, the only thought between these two people was the thought
of their love, the high and holy love of perfect faith, in which there
is no more room for desire in the heart, in which the two spirits are
not one in essence, but one in form, wherein neither exists apart, and
each is complementary to the other.
He saw these two married lovers had no need for words. They were with
each other. That was enough. Each of them knew what this meant, how
much it meant, down to the utmost limit of their joint happiness.
Ah, what happiness was this! What joy, what unutterable rapture! To
love thus wholly and without guile and without thought, without even
consciousness of loving. What could be more! What could be more than
this rich completion of spirit! What were all the gross, material
ambitions of the world compared to such love as this! This was not the
love of line and colour, the love of form and voice, the love of youth
and sprightliness, the love of device or trick. Time would be
powerless against this. The line and colour, the form and voice had
been to this but the prelude to the imperial theme. These two spirits
were now commingling to the perfect tones of the most glorious anthem,
chanted by the angels for the accord of man on earth.
He saw the crowded theatre, the blaze of light, the circles of wealth,
and youth, and beauty, and fashion, of title and distinction, hushed
for the great moment. He heard the orchestra pick up a thread of
silver melody. He listened as the orchestra seemed, in carelessness,
to lose that hint of melody. He heard that hint again, from a single
string, and then to a note of sonorous undertone, he saw the great
tenor step forth. He heard that voice begin farther away than the most
delicate breathing of the instruments below, like a murmur coming from
mid-air, under the stars. The sound descended, broadening and
mellowing as it came, until it touched the earth in notes of resonant
manhood, and then burst forth, complaining loud. Complaining of love
denied, of true love lost for ever.
He heard the song go on to the melodious climax of its final woe, and
then he heard a mighty crash like the sound of an avalanche shot from
a giddy, frozen cliff down a precipitous way to the valley below.
He looked, he saw men on their feet cheering and clapping their hands,
and women waving their handkerchiefs. Women flung their bouquets,
their bracelets, their rings upon the stage--these women drunk on a
human voice. He heard the "bravos," the "encores," cried by thousands
of throats, by those people who were at once the slaves and tyrants of
Eugene.
Then, again, he heard the orchestra pick up that silver thread of
melody----
He threw up his head. Where was this? Had he got so far? and how had
he wandered here?
Ah! Lincoln's Inn Fields!
The College of Surgeons!
Surgery, pain, disease, death! What a contrast to that great vision he
had just seen! Good God, what a contrast!
He turned hastily out of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He could not endure the
dingy, decayed look of that rusty old square. He had once been told
that the area of this square corresponded with the area of the base of
the great Pyramid.
Surgeons and embalmers, the Great Pyramid and mummies, Lincoln's Inn
Fields and ghouls! These were ghastly subjects. He had never noticed
before how stark and bleak and cold, how skeleton-like the houses in
Lincoln's Inn Fields were. It was a horrible place at this time of
year, when the leaves were dropping, when the leaves already down had
begun to rot.
The youth and manhood of the year were gone. It was in the sere, the
yellow leaf. No wholesomeness or joy could now be hoped for until the
spring was rife once more. The earth had ceased to aspire to heaven,
and all the glorious and beautiful efflorescence of earth towards the
sun was falling back once more to the dun clay from which, by the aid
of silver rains and violet and ruby dews, the sun of spring had stolen
such verdant marvels.
The dun clay, the dun earth, surgeons and mummies, pyramids and
ghouls; ah, there was no cheerfulness, no wholesomeness in any of
them! Think of an English river with willows and swans, and the
light of summer, and the blue sky, and the delicate, slender,
upward-pointing reflections in the water, and the music of the bees,
and the inextricably-mingled odour of innumerable flowers, and the
songs of birds, surprising the mellow shades of inner woods. And then
the beauty of woman, and the strength and glory of youth in man, and
the triumph and glory of song in man, and then the voice of song that
made the birds seem but the lifting of one leaf amid the tuneful
murmurs of a mighty wood, and the voice of woman answering to love in
the accents of the song----
Surgeons and mummies, pyramids and ghouls. God made none of these for
man. But all the others had the touch of his great handicraft, the
imperial fashion of his august design, the tones of sound and colour,
half hidden from the heedless, but revealed in their exquisite
perfection to the poetic sense.
Surgeons and mummies, pyramids and ghouls. Bah!
Overhead, what a gloomy sky!
The sun was now shining on all the squares and streets of Milan!