"Ha, these philosophers," said the professor, expanding in discourse a
little later--"these dreamy people who talk of the spirit, they tell
you that spirit is abstract!" He waved his great hand in a sweeping
semicircle which carried it out of our orange candle-light and freckled
it with the cold moonshine which sieved through the loosened screen of
honeysuckle. "Ha, the folly!"
"What do YOU say it is?" I asked, moving so that the smoke of my cigar
should not drift toward Oliver, who sat looking out into the garden.
"I, my friend? I do not say that it IS! But all such things, they are
only a question of names, and when I use the word 'spirit' I mean
identity--universal identity, if you like. It is what we all are,
yes--and those flowers, too. But the spirit of the flowers is not what
you smell, nor what you see, that look so pretty: it is the flowers
themself! Yet all spirit is only one spirit and one spirit is all
spirit--and if you tell me this is Pant'eism I will tell you that you
do not understand!"
"I don't tell you that," said I, "neither do I understand."
"Nor that big Keredec either!" Whereupon he loosed the rolling thunder
of his laughter. "Nor any brain born of the monkey people! But this
world is full of proof that everything that exist is all one thing, and
it is the instinct of that, when it draws us together, which makes what
we call 'love.' Even those wicked devils of egoism in our inside is
only love which grows too long the wrong way, like the finger nails of
the Chinese empress. Young love is a little sprout of universal unity.
When the young people begin to feel it, THEY are not abstract, ha? And
the young man, when he selects, he chooses one being from all the
others to mean--just for him--all that great universe of which he is a
part."
This was wandering whimsically far afield, but as I caught the
good-humoured flicker of the professor's glance at our companion I
thought I saw a purpose in his deviation. Saffren turned toward him
wonderingly, his unconscious, eager look remarkably emphasised and
brightened.
"All such things are most strange--great mysteries," continued the
professor. "For when a man has made the selection, THAT being DOES
become all the universe, and for him there is nothing else at
all--nothing else anywhere!"
Saffren's cheeks and temples were flushed as they had been when I saw
him returning that afternoon; and his eyes were wide, fixed upon
Keredec in a stare of utter amazement.
"Yes, that is true," he said slowly. "How did you know?"
Keredec returned his look with an attentive scrutiny, and made some
exclamation under his breath, which I did not catch, but there was no
mistaking his high good humour.
"Bravo!" he shouted, rising and clapping the other upon the shoulder.
"You will soon cure my rheumatism if you ask me questions like that!
Ho, ho, ho!" He threw back his head and let the mighty salvos forth.
"Ho, ho, ho! How do I know? The young, always they believe they are the
only ones who were ever young! Ho, ho, ho! Come, we shall make those
lessons very easy to-night. Come, my friend! How could that big, old
Keredec know of such things? He is too old, too foolish! Ho, ho, ho!"
As he went up the steps, the courtyard reverberating again to his
laughter, his arm resting on Saffren's shoulders, but not so heavily as
usual. The door of their salon closed upon them, and for a while
Keredec's voice could be heard booming cheerfully; it ended in another
burst of laughter.
A moment later Saffren opened the door and called to me.
"Here," I answered from my veranda, where I had just lighted my second
cigar.
"No more work to-night. All finished," he cried jubilantly, springing
down the steps. "I'm coming to have a talk with you."
Amedee had removed the candles, the moon had withdrawn in fear of a
turbulent mob of clouds, rioting into our sky from seaward; the air
smelled of imminent rain, and it was so dark that I could see my
visitor only as a vague, tall shape; but a happy excitement vibrated in
his rich voice, and his step on the gravelled path was light and
exultant.
"I won't sit down," he said. "I'll walk up and down in front of the
veranda--if it doesn't make you nervous."
For answer I merely laughed; and he laughed too, in genial response,
continuing gaily:
"Oh, it's all so different with me! Everything is. That BLIND feeling I
told you of--it's all gone. I must have been very babyish, the other
day; I don't think I could feel like that again. It used to seem to me
that I lived penned up in a circle of blank stone walls; I couldn't see
over the top for myself at all, though now and then Keredec would boost
me up and let me get a little glimmer of the country round about--but
never long enough to see what it was really like. But it's not so now.
Ah!"--he drew a long breath--"I'd like to run. I think I could run all
the way to the top of a pretty fair-sized mountain to-night, and
then"--he laughed--"jump off and ride on the clouds."
"I know how that is," I responded. "At least I did know--a few years
ago."
"Everything is a jumble with me," he went on happily, in a confidential
tone, "yet it's a heavenly kind of jumble. I can't put anything into
words. I don't THINK very well yet, though Keredec is trying to teach
me. My thoughts don't run in order, and this that's happened seems to
make them wilder, queerer--" He stopped short.
"What has happened?"
He paused in his sentry-go, facing me, and answered, in a low voice:
"I've seen her again."
"Yes, I know."
"She told me you knew it," he said, "--that she had told you."
"Yes."
"But that's not all," he said, his voice rising a little. "I saw her
again the day after she told you--"
"You did!" I murmured.
"Oh, I tell myself that it's a dream," he cried, "that it CAN'T be
true. For it has been EVERY day since then! That's why I haven't joined
you in the woods. I have been with her, walking with her, listening to
her, looking at her--always feeling that it must be unreal and that I
must try not to wake up. She has been so kind--so wonderfully,
beautifully kind to me!"
"She has met you?" I asked, thinking ruefully of George Ward, now on
the high seas in the pleasant company of old hopes renewed.
"She has let me meet her. And to-day we lunched at the inn at Dives and
then walked by the sea all afternoon. She gave me the whole day--the
whole day! You see"--he began to pace again--"you see I was right, and
you were wrong. She wasn't offended--she was glad--that I couldn't help
speaking to her; she has said so."
"Do you think," I interrupted, "that she would wish you to tell me
this?"
"Ah, she likes you!" he said so heartily, and appearing meanwhile so
satisfied with the completeness of his reply, that I was fain to take
some satisfaction in it myself. "What I wanted most to say to you," he
went on, "is this: you remember you promised to tell me whatever you
could learn about her--and about her husband?"
"I remember."
"It's different now. I don't want you to," he said. "I want only to
know what she tells me herself. She has told me very little, but I know
when the time comes she WILL tell me everything. But I wouldn't hasten
it. I wouldn't have anything changed from just THIS!"
"You mean--"
"I mean the way it IS. If I could hope to see her every day, to be in
the woods with her, or down by the shore--oh, I don't want to know
anything but that!"
"No doubt you have told her," I ventured, "a good deal about yourself,"
and was instantly ashamed of myself. I suppose I spoke out of a sense
of protest against Mrs. Harman's strange lack of conventionality,
against so charming a lady's losing her head as completely as she
seemed to have lost hers, and it may have been, too, out of a feeling
of jealousy for poor George--possibly even out of a little feeling of
the same sort on my own account. But I couldn't have said it except for
the darkness, and, as I say, I was instantly ashamed.
It does not whiten my guilt that the shaft did not reach him.
"I've told her all I know," he said readily, and the unconscious pathos
of the answer smote me. "And all that Keredec has let me know. You see
I haven't--"
"But do you think," I interrupted quickly, anxious, in my remorse, to
divert him from that channel, "do you think Professor Keredec would
approve, if he knew?"
"I think he would," he responded slowly, pausing in his walk again. "I
have a feeling that perhaps he does know, and yet I have been afraid to
tell him, afraid he might try to stop me--keep me from going to wait
for her. But he has a strange way of knowing things; I think he knows
everything in the world! I have felt to-night that he knows this,
and--it's very strange, but I--well, what WAS it that made him so glad?"
"The light is still burning in his room," I said quietly.
"You mean that I ought to tell him?" His voice rose a little.
"He's done a good deal for you, hasn't he?" I suggested. "And even if
he does know he might like to hear it from you."
"You're right; I'll tell him to-night." This came with sudden decision,
but with less than marked what followed. "But he can't stop me, now. No
one on earth shall do that, except Madame d'Armand herself. No one!"
"I won't quarrel with that," I said drily, throwing away my cigar,
which had gone out long before.
He hesitated, and then I saw his hand groping toward me in the
darkness, and, rising, I gave him mine.
"Good night," he said, and shook my hand as the first sputterings of
the coming rain began to patter on the roof of the pavilion. "I'm glad
to tell him; I'm glad to have told you. Ah, but isn't this," he cried,
"a happy world!"
Turning, he ran to the gallery steps. "At last I'm glad," he called
back over his shoulder, "I'm glad that I was born--"
A gust of wind blew furiously into the courtyard at that instant, and I
heard his voice indistinctly, but I thought--though I might have been
mistaken--that I caught a final word, and that it was "again."