It was certainly singular, in the light of other matters, that on
sitting down in his studio after she had left town Nick should not, as
regards the effort to project plastically some beautiful form, have felt
more chilled by the absence of a friend who was such an embodiment of
beauty. She was away and he missed her and longed for her, and yet
without her the place was more filled with what he wanted to find in it.
He turned into it with confused feelings, the strongest of which was a
sense of release and recreation. It looked blighted and lonely and
dusty, and his old studies, as he rummaged them out, struck him even as
less inspired than the last time he had ventured to face them. But amid
this neglected litter, in the colourless and obstructed light of a high
north window which needed washing, he came nearer tasting the
possibility of positive happiness: it appeared to him that, as he had
said to Julia, he was more in possession of his soul. It was frivolity
and folly, it was puerility, to spend valuable hours pottering over the
vain implements of an art he had relinquished; and a certain shame that
he had felt in presenting his plea to Julia that Sunday night arose from
the sense not of what he clung to, but of what he had given up. He had
turned his back on serious work, so that pottering was now all he could
aspire to. It couldn't be fruitful, it couldn't be anything but
ridiculous, almost ignoble; but it soothed his nerves, it was in the
nature of a secret dissipation. He had never suspected he should some
day have nerves on his own part to count with; but this possibility had
been revealed to him on the day it became clear that he was letting
something precious go. He was glad he had not to justify himself to the
critical, for this might have been a delicate business. The critical
were mostly absent; and besides, shut up all day in his studio, how
should he ever meet them? It was the place in the world where he felt
furthest away from his constituents. That was a part of the
pleasure--the consciousness that for the hour the coast was clear and
his mind independent. His mother and his sister had gone to Broadwood:
Lady Agnes--the phrase sounds brutal but represents his state of
mind--was well out of the way. He had written to her as soon as Julia
left town--he had apprised her of the fact that his wedding-day was
fixed: a relief for poor Lady Agnes to a period of intolerable
mystification, of dark, dumb wondering and watching. She had said her
say the day of the poll at Harsh; she was too proud to ask and too
discreet to "nag"; so she could only wait for something that didn't
come. The unconditioned loan of Broadwood had of course been something
of a bribe to patience: she had at first felt that on the day she should
take possession of that capital house Julia would indeed seem to have
entered the family. But the gift had confirmed expectations just enough
to make disappointment more bitter; and the discomfort was greater in
proportion as she failed to discover what was the matter. Her daughter
Grace was much occupied with this question, and brought it up for
discussion in a manner irritating to her ladyship, who had a high theory
of being silent about it, but who, however, in the long run, was more
unhappy when, in consequence of a reprimand, the girl suggested no
reasons at all than when she suggested stupid ones. It eased Lady Agnes
a little to advert to the mystery when she could have the air of not
having begun.
The letter Nick received from her the first day of Passion Week in reply
to his important communication was the only one he read at that moment;
not counting of course the several notes Mrs. Dallow addressed to him
from Griffin. There were letters piled up, as he knew, in Calcutta
Gardens, which his servant had strict orders not to bring to the studio.
Nick slept now in the bedroom attached to this retreat; got things, as
he wanted them, from Calcutta Gardens; and dined at his club, where a
stray surviving friend or two, seeing him prowl about the library in the
evening, was free to impute to such eccentricity some subtly political
basis. When he thought of his neglected letters he remembered Mr.
Carteret's convictions on the subject of not "getting behind"; they made
him laugh, in the slightly sonorous painting-room, as he bent over one
of the old canvases that he had ventured to turn to the light. He was
fully determined, however, to master his correspondence before going
down, the last thing before Parliament should reassemble, to spend
another day at Beauclere. Mastering his correspondence meant, in Nick's
mind, breaking open envelopes; writing answers was scarcely involved in
the idea. But Mr. Carteret would never guess that. Nick was not moved
even to write to him that the affair with Julia was on the point of
taking the form he had been so good as to desire: he reserved the
pleasure of this announcement for a personal interview.
The day before Good Friday, in the morning, his stillness was broken by
a rat-tat-tat on the outer door of his studio, administered apparently
by the knob of a walking-stick. His servant was out and he went to the
door, wondering who his visitor could be at such a time, especially of
the rather presuming class. The class was indicated by the visitor's
failure to look for the bell--since there _was_ a bell, though it
required a little research. In a moment the mystery was solved: the
gentleman who stood smiling at him from the threshold could only be
Gabriel Nash. Nick had not seen this whimsical personage for several
months, and had had no news of him beyond a general intimation that he
was following his fancy in foreign parts. His old friend had
sufficiently prepared him, at the time of their reunion in Paris, for
the idea of the fitful in intercourse; and he had not been ignorant, on
his return from Paris, that he should have had an opportunity to miss
him if he had not been too busy to take advantage of it. In London,
after the episode at Harsh, Gabriel had not reappeared: he had redeemed
none of the pledges given the night they walked together to Notre Dame
and conversed on important matters. He was to have interposed in Nick's
destiny, but he had not interposed; he was to have pulled him hard and
in the opposite sense from Julia, but there had been no pulling; he was
to have saved him, as he called it, and yet Nick was lost. This
circumstance indeed formed his excuse: the member for Harsh had rushed
so wantonly to perdition. Nick had for the hour seriously wished to keep
hold of him: he valued him as a salutary influence. Yet on coming to his
senses after his election our young man had recognised that Nash might
very well have reflected on the thanklessness of such a slippery
subject--might have held himself released from his vows. Of course it
had been particularly in the event of a Liberal triumph that he had
threatened to make himself felt; the effect of a brand plucked from the
burning would be so much greater if the flames were already high. Yet
Nick had not kept him to the letter of this pledge, and had so fully
admitted the right of a thorough connoisseur, let alone a faithful
friend, to lose patience with him that he was now far from greeting his
visitor with a reproach. He felt much more thrown on his defence.
Gabriel, however, forbore at first to attack him. He brought in only
blandness and benevolence and a great content at having obeyed the
mystic voice--it was really a remarkable case of second sight--which had
whispered him that the recreant comrade of his prime was in town. He had
just come back from Sicily after a southern winter, according to a
custom frequent with him, and had been moved by a miraculous prescience,
unfavourable as the moment might seem, to go and ask for Nick in
Calcutta Gardens, where he had extracted from his friend's servant an
address not known to all the world. He showed Nick what a mistake it had
been to fear a dull arraignment, and how he habitually ignored all
lapses and kept up the standard only by taking a hundred fine things for
granted. He also abounded more than ever in his own sense, reminding his
relieved listener how no recollection of him, no evocation of him in
absence, could ever do him justice. You couldn't recall him without
seeming to exaggerate him, and then acknowledged, when you saw him, that
your exaggeration had fallen short. He emerged out of vagueness--his
Sicily might have been the Sicily of _A Winter's Tale_--and would
evidently be reabsorbed in it; but his presence was positive and
pervasive enough. He was duly "intense" while he lasted. His connexions
were with beauty, urbanity and conversation, as usual, but they made up
a circle you couldn't find in the Court Guide. Nick had a sense that he
knew "a lot of esthetic people," but he dealt in ideas much more than
in names and addresses. He was genial and jocose, sunburnt and
romantically allusive. It was to be gathered that he had been living for
many days in a Saracenic tower where his principal occupation was to
watch for the flushing of the west. He had retained all the serenity of
his opinions and made light, with a candour of which the only defect was
apparently that it was not quite enough a conscious virtue, of many of
the objects of common esteem. When Nick asked him what he had been doing
he replied, "Oh living, you know"; and the tone of the words offered
them as the story of a great deed. He made a long visit, staying to
luncheon and after luncheon, so that the little studio heard all at once
a greater quantity of brave talk than in the several previous years of
its history. With much of our tale left to tell it is a pity that so
little of this colloquy may be reported here; since, as affairs took
their course, it marked really--if the question be of noting the exact
point--a turn of the tide in Nick Dormer's personal situation. He was
destined to remember the accent with which Nash exclaimed, on his
drawing forth sundry specimens of amateurish earnestness:
"I say--I say--I say!"