"I'm fighting for my own honour and glory, too."
He drew her attention to a passage where he called upon Heaven to forbid
that he should appear to apologize for so great a man. He was only
concerned with explaining why Prothero was and would remain unacceptable
to a generation of brokers; which was not so much a defence of Prothero
as an indictment of his generation. She would see how he had rubbed it
in.
She followed, panting a little in her excitement, the admirable points
he made. There, where he showed that there was no reason why this Celt
should be an alien to the Saxon race. Because (her heart leaped as she
followed) his genius had all the robust and virile qualities. He was not
the creature of a creed, or a conviction, or a theory; neither was he a
fantastic dreamer. He was a man of realities, the very type (Tanqueray
had rubbed that well in) that hard-headed Englishmen adore, a surgeon,
a physician, a traveller, a fighter among fighting men. He had never
blinked a fact (Laura smiled as she remembered how Owen had said that
that was what a Brodrick never did); he had never shirked a danger. But
(Tanqueray, in a new paragraph, had plunged into the heart of his
subject) on the top of it all he was a seer; a man who saw _through_ the
things that other men see. And to say that he saw, that he saw through
things, was the humblest and simplest statement of his case. To him the
visible world was a veil worn thin by the pressure of the reality behind
it; it had the translucence that belongs to it in the form of its
eternity. He was in a position to judge. He had lived face to face and
hand to hand with all forms of corporeal horror, and there was no mass
of disease or of corruption that he did not see in its resplendent and
divine transparency. It was simple and self-evident to him that the
world of bodies was made so and not otherwise. It was also clear as
daylight that the entire scheme of things existed solely to unfold and
multiply and vary the everlasting-to-everlasting-world-without-end
communion between God and the soul. To him this communion was a fact, a
fact above all facts, the supremely and only interesting fact. It was so
natural a thing that he sang about it as spontaneously as other poets
sing about their love and their mistresses. So simple and so
self-evident was it that he had called his latest and greatest poems
"Transparences."
"It sounds," she said, "as if you saw what he sees."
"I don't," said Tanqueray. "I only see _him_."
At that, all of a sudden, the clever imp broke down.
"George," she said, "I love you--I don't care if Rose _does_ hear--I
love you for defending him."
[Illustration: "George," she said ... "I love you for defending him."]
"Love me for something else. He doesn't need defending."
"Not he! But all the same I love you."
It was as if she had drawn aside a fold of her pretty garment and shown
him, where the scar had been, a jewel, a pearl with fire in the white of
it.