Kingston made haste to forget, as far as possible, the ominous
prophecies that had descended on him, and in a rush of final activities
the Season drew to an end. Gundred was beginning to turn her thoughts
towards Brakelond, and as soon as the Eton and Harrow match was over,
she decreed that they must take their flight thither. She had many
duties to discharge there in a very short time, for, after little
more than a fortnight, other duties would call them all northward to
Ivescar for the hecatombs of the Twelfth. Meanwhile at Brakelond there
was a new school to be opened, a Church Bazaar to be patronized, a
Primrose League Fête presided over, and a horrid Radical fishmonger
to be deprived of custom, with a stately autograph exposition of his
crimes by the Lady Gundred Darnley. There were also a few lighter
tasks, and especially a long-standing engagement to dine with the
Hoope-Arkwrights. The Hoope-Arkwrights were new people of great
wealth, who had bought the old house of the Restormels, beautified
it regardless of expense, and ever since had been angling for the
friendship of ‘the Castle.’ By Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s untiring
benevolence towards bazaars, Gundred had at last been brought to accept
an invitation to dine at Restormel. ‘Poor things,’ she said, ‘one
should always give pleasure when one can, and really it will be quite
enough to ask them to tea one day.’ Accordingly she had promised the
Hoope-Arkwrights the favour of her presence, and graciously arranged
her plans to fit in with the date of their festival. At the Eton and
Harrow she shone resplendent in her favourite shades of mauve, to the
devouring wrath of other mothers, who, in spite of artificial aids,
only succeeded in looking their full forty or fifty. She scanned the
gowns and yawned over the play, and paraded proudly about on the arm
of Jim, imagining him to be delighted with the occasion, rather than
in a cold sweat of horror at every moment, lest anyone else should
hear the comments that his mother sent forth in her cool penetrating
tones. Then, having discharged her duty by her son and the match, she
drove back to Grosvenor Street and turned her thoughts to departure.
Kingston would run down to Brakelond in the motor. Gundred enlarged
on her longing to accompany him, but declared that duty imperiously
called upon her to accompany the household by train, to see that the
journey was made satisfactorily, without any loss of luggage, or
extravagance, or indecorum of conduct. Accordingly, on the appointed
day, the Lady Gundred Darnley might have been seen amid pyramids of
parcels and stacks of trunks, taking her Hegira at the head of an army
of retainers. As for Kingston, he had yet another day or so in town,
and then must follow his wife down to the West so as not to disappoint
those ‘poor Hoope-Arkwright people’ of the glory that had been promised
them.
The weather was settled, and he anticipated a successful run. He was
tired of London. There was heavy over him a sense of things about to
happen. Matters seemed coming to a head. What his foreboding meant he
could not tell; he had put the old uncle’s vague prophecies far away
at the back of his consciousness, and attributed the oppression that
crushed his spirits with a weight of impending catastrophe entirely to
the influences of the thunderous weather and the air of London, stale
and exhausted by the season. It was with relief that he got into the
car on a radiant morning, and set out on his flight from the sultry
city.
But the day’s journey was not prosperously made. The roads were dusty,
the wind was baffling, the car went peevishly and ill. Panting heavily
along, the machine traversed the beautiful heaths and uplands that lie
to the west of London. Kingston had meant to break his journey far on
the way. It was necessary that he should arrive at Brakelond in good
time on the morrow, seeing that this festivity over which Gundred so
fussed was due to take place that evening. And so, the distance down
to the West being great, Kingston had planned to spend the necessarily
intervening night at Salisbury, so as to give himself ample time to
make the rest of the journey. However, after the long, unsatisfactory
day of delays, a downright catastrophe at last brought him to a
standstill, no farther advanced upon his pilgrimage than Basingstoke.
In that once placid but now assertive little metropolis, hallowed at
once by the memories of Mad Margaret and of Elizabeth Bennet, Kingston
found himself forced to make his rest that night. He gave orders for an
early start on the morrow, then wandered out from the grim desolation
peculiar to English country hotels into the streets and market-place.
Roaming from alley to alley, he contrasted old with new, and beneath
the walls of the old Assembly Rooms, bent his mind to see the famous
Ball where Darcy first sighted his destiny. Soon, within the old room
above, barnlike now and desolate, ghostly lights were shining, and the
tinkle of long-dead music was blending with the rhythmical tumult of
many feet. Brilliant and entrancing, Elizabeth came and went, up and
down the dance; Mary posed and minced, Kitty and Lydia were agog for
partners. As the stranger outside stood and recalled that immortal
scene, the visible world around him faded quickly away, and again
he understood how much more real may be that which has no earthly
existence than that which earthly hands may touch and earthly eyes
examine. Streets and walls of Basingstoke, hideous clock-tower and
town-hall--it was not that they were real; they were phantoms of an
ugly hour; reality, for evermore, was that little town which never was
and never will be, where dwelt those men and women that never lived on
earth, and yet must live eternally--those men and women so far more
vivid and lasting than the ghosts amid whom we live; those real men
and women whose voices must ring on perennially down the ages, giving
joy and satisfaction to generation after generation, until the English
language has passed with Nineveh and Babylon into the limbo of things
forgotten.
Sombre hucksters, clerks, shopkeepers moved up and down the dingy
roadway. To Kingston, by now, they were but vapours; the street had
changed, and its population was of old friends, bright and clearly
recognised. Here strutted Wickham and Denny through the dusk,
red-coated and raffish, in attendance on the giggling Lydia; and
‘stuffy Uncle Phillips, breathing port wine,’ came lumbering paunchily
towards his doorway. Here, where a modern Emporium had faded away,
giving place to the neat-fronted little shop of bygone days, shone
the shoe-roses that were to dance at Netherfield, and the bonnet that
Lydia bought because it was ‘not so very ugly.’ Farther on, again, the
pretentious hotel where Kingston was to spend his night had melted into
vacancy. In its place stood the long, rambling inn, whitened, clean and
simple, with its pillared portico and its hospitable entrance. And
whose lumbering chariot was it that stood there at the door, whose high
turban and commanding beak loomed out of its deep, cavernous recesses?
Surely, surely there was Lady Catherine angrily demanding the road to
Longbourne, and insisting that the morrow’s weather must certainly be
fine? And now Mr. Bingley rode along on his black horse, blue coat
and all; Charlotte Lucas stepped briskly by on an errand; Darcy came
escorting the effusive Caroline to the shop; last of all appeared the
centre of the vision--the world, rather, where all those visions had
been born and made real--the deceptively meek and mild little maiden
with the twinkling eyes; the demure and inconspicuous spinster in
whom dwelt the keenest spirit that ever spoke in English, or looked
out for English ‘follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies.’
Round-cheeked, prematurely capped, sedate, Miss Austen pattered on her
road. It was with a sudden cold shock that her passing called back
Kingston into the world of to-day. Gone again was the real Basingstoke
in a flash, and all the real people that had dwelt there--gone like
the sudden wreckage of a dream. Now there stretched before his eyes
only the crude and banal sordor of the prosaic modern town. Jude the
Obscure, and Sue, and beastly Arabella had violently usurped the place
of Bingley and Darcy and adorable Elizabeth. Everything was changed
to ugliness and squalor. Kingston, chilled and saddened, returned to
the hotel which once more stood on the site of that old inn where the
Misses Bennet had eaten their nuncheon.
In the morning, when the time came for Kingston to set off once more on
his journey, even the bustling streets of to-day had a cheerfulness of
their own. The sun was shining brilliantly, the motor had recovered its
good humour, everything looked solid and practical and businesslike
and wholesome. The vision of the twilight had passed. Jane Austen was
once more dust of Winchester Cathedral, and the butchers and bakers
and grocers who stood by their shop-doors and counters were now the
sole occupants of the little town; the mystic walls had melted into
modern brick and stucco, the ghosts had faded back into the world
they came from. And yet, as Kingston went on his way, he knew that in
a hundred years or less the case would be reversed again, as he had
seen it reversed in the dusk of the previous evening. For ultimate
reality conquers ephemeral, apparent reality, and the butchers and the
bakers and the grocers would long since have passed away, and become
indistinguishable drift again of the earth, with no memory to say that
they had ever worn flesh at all; but Bingley and Darcy and Elizabeth
would still be there, eternally young, unforgotten and unforgettable.
For what death can touch the life invisible? Reality lives on for ever;
it is only the composite, the visible, the tangible, that can break up
in change, and pass, and disappear. The solid is the only phantom.
On and on through the tranquil glory of the day and the country the
motor sped willingly upon its course, put to its highest pressure of
flight, that the whole distance might be accomplished in as little
time as might be. To-day it ungrudgingly gave its best energies to
travelling cheerfully, indefatigably, briskly. Through sleepy little
towns it hummed and whirred; along deep lanes, and under the shadow of
great ancient forests. Then by degrees the way became more open. The
road wound on, over stretch after stretch of purple moorland, dotted
here and there with sparse pines or hollies that had watched the
hunting of William the Norman; over vast tracts of heather and sedge,
over hill and valley of the wide country. By now the clear freshness
of morning had given way to the leaden glare of midday. The air was
thick and dull with heat, and banked clouds indistinguishably crowded
the dome of heaven, only occasionally permitting a pale sun to pierce
the haze. The sky had no longer any colour; an indeterminate brassy
heat pervaded it, and its farthest distance melted sullenly into the
livid profundities of the landscape, till there was no horizon, only
one vague vapour filling the uttermost parts of the world.
Kingston drove on unregarding. The road was clear and uneventful;
his mind, released from the motorist’s incessant agony as to hens,
inexperienced dogs, defiant children, and deaf old women who abruptly
cross at corners, was left free to occupy itself with the wonder
suggested by his visit of the night before to shadowland. What, after
all, was this reality that all men think of? He himself, at once solid
and evanescent, of what was he built? Of what were all his neighbours
built? Where was the permanent element in them? Flesh and body and
bones must go; following the logical sequence, he saw that resemblances
must go, recognitions, and the consequent reintegration of bygone
personal passions. So far that mysterious old man from the East had
been right. These superficial passions belong to the superficial Self,
and must pass away when the superficial Self resolves itself once
more into the elements of which it had originally been composed; but
behind all this, above all this, there must needs be some immortal
part, some real Self that could recognise the eternal reality in the
creations of an old maid’s vanished brain, and understand that the
invisible has a very solid and a very vital existence. As he thought
the matter through, the sense of physical personality began to melt
away. Gradually he grew into comprehension of the fact that the He
of everyday life, the He that has wants, angers, hungers, thirst--the
He, in fact, that everyone imagines to be the enduring, everlasting
entity, that all men crave and agonize to believe immortal, has really,
in the everlasting truth of things, no genuine existence whatever.
The only He that could pass on into immortality was the mysterious
something behind, the indestructible Thought that could call the body
and all its manifestations into being, and then, when tired, dismiss
the body again into corruption and go forward on its road. Unable, of
course, fully to dissever his consciousness from the consciousness
of physical existence, his mind, in the absorbed immobility of his
limbs, found itself more and more nearly able to face the fact that
its personality had nothing to do with the earthly Kingston Darnley.
The earthly Kingston Darnley, the thing that wore clothes, and ate,
and drank, and was cold if naked, and cross if hungry, and angry
if denied its wishes--that was a mere accident, built of earthly
accidents like itself, no more capable of immortality than the food
it wanted or the clothes that made so large a part of what it called
its existence. As they, in an hour or a year, must dissolve and pass
back into their constituent elements so must that phantasmal Self of
his resolve itself, in the course of a few seasons more, into its
constituent elements again, and die for ever with the death of its own
desires. Only the inner, secret Self must go for ever forward upon the
upward way, untouched by all the shifting changes which that earthly,
ghostly Self might suffer. And Isabel, the lost thing for which he was
searching, what was she, and to which Self did she belong--the real
or the phantom Self? Was she the creation of his higher or his lower
desires? And if he was to find her, as now he felt a growing certainty
that he must, what would she be? Into what form would the splendour
of her last moment have transferred her? And now he began to remember
more vividly the old man’s warning. With what peril of agony and
disappointment was fraught his quest, its realization and attainment?
By the attainment of one’s keenest desire comes that anguish of
disappointment which is fierce in proportion to the fierceness of the
desires that called it into being. Desire, by satisfying itself, begets
desire, and so, with each fresh craving and its gratification, the
chain of suffering grows heavier and stronger, binding the soul more
and more fast prisoner in the bondage of pain. For a moment he saw this
clearly, understood that only in freedom from the hungers of the lower
self can spring that freedom from sorrow which is the ultimate end of
all human ambition, the goal of all humanity’s highest hopes, here and
in the hereafter. Then his vision clouded, and the lower self intruded
its presence once more. His mind dwelt on the achievement of his quest,
the long-delayed reunion with the thing that had been lost. Even had
he willed to escape, he remembered now that in a moment of what had
then been mere fantasy he had plighted his troth to Isabel far down the
future. Now, though she might perhaps be free, he was tightly bound--at
once by his pledge as by his desires. Perhaps, in so far as his
desires had forcibly purged themselves from grossness, the grossness
of his bondage might be softened. But a slave he needs must be to the
craving which he had so fomented by indulgence through so many desirous
years. A dim fear began to fall like a veil across the radiance of his
anticipation. Now he understood that reunion with Isabel could not be
quite what he had thought and longed for. There must be some change,
and with that change must come suffering. He had said, in the ardour of
his desideration, that he would take all risks of sorrow. Now he first
felt that the risks might well be heavy, and the sorrow sooner or later
inevitable. A sense of foreboding filled him. What he wanted that he
should have, and with his satisfaction must come that grief of dust and
ashes which always makes the gratification of one desire the prelude
of its yet bitterer successor, even as the drunkard’s satisfaction of
his craving only means the renewal of a redoubled, more insatiable
craving on the morrow. His desire should achieve its end, and with that
achievement find only the beginning of another desire and a keener
pain. A vague, mysterious fear of the path which he had set himself
to tread now dominated all his thoughts. It had seemed to lead into
such bright places. But now shadows lay thick across it, and its way
stretched down towards the abysses. He began to dread the road on which
he had so deliberately set his course ever since that violent sorrow of
twenty years before. He was suddenly afraid of that future for which he
had so long been craving, and shrank from the fulfilment of his longer,
eager quest.
Without delay or misadventure, the motor covered the distances with
untiring appetite as fast as they unfolded themselves, further and
further into blue horizon after blue horizon. Brakelond was nearing;
Kingston might soon expect to see its mysterious mass dominating the
lesser hills and woods. There was now but one steep barrier of hills
to surmount--a slow, straight climb of three miles or more to the
summit of a ridge--and thence the road would drop straight over easy
declivities to the last brief levels that would still separate the
traveller from his destination. Already the hill stretched ahead of
Kingston. Before him, with the appalling directness of those eternal
Roman roads, the white ribbon stretched taut and stern, away and
away to the crown of the pass. Kingston set the motor to breast the
long rise with all its might, for there was no time to waste. His
calculations had run things very fine. He had only another hour or
so to get home, wash, dress, and be ready to accompany Gundred on
her mission of condescension. If he failed, he knew well the neat
reproaches that would meet him, the mild sighings, the pathetic
resignation so much harder to bear than any objurgations. He pushed the
motor to its utmost exertions.
The acclivity was now climbing over open moorland. Away to right and
left fell the slopes of the hill towards the rich levels far beneath.
Evening was shedding its glamour over the country, and all the details
of the way were transfigured by the magic of twilight. Straight ahead,
over the edge of the pass, the sun was setting in a splendour of
scarlet that spread a solid beam of fire from pole to pole, beneath
the solid purple of the cloud-banks that rolled and towered up towards
the zenith. The air beneath was a-quiver with fire, and the earth
was kindled to a fierce and lucent tone of violet, hot, yet solemn,
mysterious, almost tragic in the breathless stillness of the evening.
Against the glare beyond, the climbing road shone cold and ghastly
under the unbroken cloud-masses overhead, grey as a rain-washed bone by
contrast with the amethyst of the earth and the sudden furious glory
of the sky. Leading up over darkness to that scarlet furnace in the
west, it might have been the very way to Hell. Terrible ghosts might
be mounting its straight, still stretch. As the motor gradually rolled
up its slopes, Kingston saw that there was indeed a wayfarer upon the
road. Far away as yet, hardly discernible, a black speck was nearing
the summit of the pass. A quick, fantastic terror suddenly seized
on Kingston; he shrank from overtaking the wanderer, from passing
him, from seeing his face. Even from afar that solitary figure had
a malign influence. It was some ominous and evil thing, that remote
point of darkness on the ghostly pallor of the road. The moments, as
they throbbed by, seemed big with terrible events about to be born.
A dreadful hush of expectation filled the world. And still the motor
climbed pitilessly, gaining on the pedestrian so far ahead. Kingston
encouraged his foolish instincts so as the better to laugh at them. It
was this strange evening that had given him such a start--this strange
evening, filled with an immemorial, awful loneliness. This light was
mysterious and haunting--the deep sombre purples of the moorland, the
grim, cold whiteness of the road--and then, at the end of the gloom,
that abrupt, ferocious glare beyond, that terrifying blaze of the
sunset between the two rims of darkness above and beneath. The whole
effect was unearthly, almost crushing. And the world seemed holding
its breath; nothing stirred, no leaf, no zephyr; the cry of no bird
could be discerned, and even the dry susurrence of the heather-bells
was stilled in the blank immobility of the atmosphere. And through the
uncanny hush the throbs and pantings of the motor broke obtrusively,
like the agonies of some great monster in travail, intensifying by
contrast the vast loneliness of the silence. And there, arriving at the
crown of the pass, moved on the one sign of life that occurred anywhere
in the desolate prospect. That sign of life added a strangely jarring,
menacing note.
And then to Kingston’s cherished feelings of mystic awe was abruptly
added another. That figure far up on the grey road was no stranger.
He knew it well, had known it from time immemorial--known it and yet
feared it. The instinct came upon him with a crash, like the sudden
recognition of something dreadful that leaps into a nightmare. It
was no qualm; it was a certainty. He knew that when he should have
reached the summit of the ridge he would look back at the wayfarer’s
face and see--_what_, he could not tell, but something, at all events,
that he had known for years. The feeling grew on him, and grew and
grew, until at last a devouring curiosity annihilated his previous
dread. He abandoned himself to the influences of the wizard twilight,
and allowed himself to nurse these fantasies which daylight could not
have conceived, nor his daylight self been brought to tolerate. Now,
however, by the poised, watchful dusk, their power was strengthened and
made momentarily heavier. Overwhelming impulses of acquaintanceship
seized Kingston. Who could it be that had so enthralled his attention
even from afar? And now they were close upon the mystery. It wore a
man’s figure, lithe and tall, in a dark knickerbocker suit. Suddenly it
turned at the noise of their coming, and looked round. Kingston had one
instant of suspense, then fell headlong into an abyss of self-contempt.
He had so cosseted his absurdities that he had come at last to believe
in them. Why, this wanderer was simply a respectable young gentleman of
one-and-twenty or so, whom he had never set eyes on in his life before.
He was good-looking, too--brilliantly good-looking, with fine features,
a beautifully springy form, and splendid grey eyes, but a total
stranger none the less. Kingston felt a pang of disappointment; but
though on the surface he knew that he had never seen the boy before,
yet a dim instinct within him still obstinately insisted that this was
no first meeting. The instinct would not be cried down by perverse
facts; it clamoured for recognition, and gradually the former acute
feeling of curiosity and acquaintance began to rise again in Kingston.
He felt sure he must already have seen the boy somewhere, though he
could not recall a single feature. Probably he had caught a glimpse of
him in London, and his subconscious mind had photographed the glimpse
upon his memory. On a sudden irresistible impulse, he slowed the motor
on its course, and as he passed the wayfarer, leaned out towards him.
‘We seem to be going the same way,’ he shouted above the outraged
bellowings of the machine. ‘Can’t I give you a lift?’
The other looked up in surprise. Seen at such close quarters, he was
more handsome than ever.
‘Oh, thank you,’ he answered after a pause. ‘Thanks very much. But I am
very nearly at my destination.’
Refusal spoke clearly in his tones, and as he replied Kingston felt
again the same overpowering certainty that this was an acquaintance
of long standing. Everything seemed violently, vividly familiar, yet
nothing, no inflection, no feature, could he track down to its place
in his memory. Besides, if his instinct had been true, surely the
stranger must have shared it, and the offer of a lift would have led,
as it was intended to do, towards a mutual recognition. But the boy
evidently had no such feeling of acquaintance, and had declined the
suggestion without the faintest hint that he had ever seen the motorist
before. The whole coil must be a web of mere fancy. Kingston released
the machine, which bounded gladly on, leaving the wayfarer behind in
the shadow of the hill. Another instant, and they were on the summit.
A blinding glory dazzled Kingston’s eyes. The whole atmosphere was one
shimmering ripple of light. Beneath his feet, dim in the vibrating
gold, lay the last two miles of level and plain. Indistinguishable,
though close at hand among its woods, lay the redecorated house of
the Restormels, where he was to dine that evening. And there, beyond,
infinitely remote amid the vaporous radiance, rose Brakelond, far above
the world, silhouetted in shades of purple against the devastating
glare of the sunset. Wonderfully magical, wonderfully mystical in the
last fires of the evening, seemed that fantastic vision of the Castle,
fit haunt of old dead passions and splendours, the glowing casket of
half a thousand memories, gorgeous, palpitating, terrible. For an
instant he paused on the summit of the hill, gazing at that crown of
wonder against the flaming west; then he gave the straining motor its
head, and plunged downwards on the final stage of his journey. Soon,
as he approached it, the Castle lost its mystery, grew solid, looming,
earthly. Kingston suddenly realized that there, high up in her great
vaulted room, its Lady Gundred was sitting in front of her mirror,
having her hair done, and wondering whether her husband would arrive
in time for dinner. The motor rushed fiercely up the last steep stages
of the Castle hill, passed under the machicolated gateway, and came
noisily to rest in the shadow of the Erechtheion. Kingston, thoroughly
restored by now to prose and sanity, leaped hastily out, and went to
his room to get ready.