The interloper was established between Kingston and Gundred, and the
purely formal nature of their marriage might have been clear even
to themselves. They fell apart without wrench or difficulty, and on
Gundred a heavy sense of loneliness settled like a cloud. She it was
that suffered most from the separation, for she had not her husband’s
compensations. All these years she had lived in the happiness of what
she believed to be perfect intimacy with Kingston, sharing his hopes,
his wishes, his thoughts; now, in a flash, she was made to guess
that she had merely shared the outer aspects of his life, that the
fancied beautiful completeness of their union was merely the band of
tolerance strengthened through the long years by custom. Now that the
elasticity of the tie that bound them was put to too great a stretch,
it flew asunder, and, in the rebound, struck Gundred a stinging blow.
It was not, of course, to be expected of her that she should realize
the situation clearly, or face the true state of the case with any
perspicacious candour. All she felt was felt dimly, instinctively,
half-consciously; not even to herself would she admit what she felt, or
analyze the solitude that seemed gathering round her. But very vaguely,
in the introduction of Ivor Restormel, she understood that she herself
must somehow have failed--could not be quite all to her husband that
she had imagined herself, must at some point have fallen short of the
perfect wife’s proper performance. This uncomfortable perception,
which caught her in her tenderest spot, she made haste to burke and
bury in the depths of her consciousness. But its ghost occasionally
walked; and, though she did the best for herself by insisting daily
on her husband’s unjustifiable cruelty and the blackness of the
influences that had seduced him, yet she could never wholly escape
that faint instinct of failure which was the one thing that her
efficiency-worshipping nature most passionately dreaded.
The days went by in a strain that was wholly absurd, but also
wholly unpleasant. Examining things in the light of healthy, normal
experience, Gundred could not even tell herself that she had a
grievance. She still feared and disliked the presence of Ivor
Restormel, with a fear which no reason could account for, but which no
reason could dispel. But in every way the boy was perfectly harmless
and even pleasant. Gundred, in her heart of hearts had expected that
her instinct would immediately be justified on closer acquaintance by
discovering that Ivor Restormel took drugs, or read French novels, or
had a tendency to gambling and kleptomania. She watched him carefully,
in public and in private, secretly and openly, hoping that some such
development might force her husband to recognise the soundness of her
intuitions, and get rid of the undesirable immigrant. However, none
of these idiosyncrasies could be brought to light, observe she never
so minutely. The boy was just an ordinary, nice, healthy boy; there
was nothing vague or mysterious or neurotic about him; his personality
had no strong colours anywhere, was altogether mild, unformed, healthy
in its growth. And yet Gundred, recognising all this, could not help
shrinking from him, shrinking from him more eagerly day by day, with
a vigour of feeling not by any means wholly attributable to her anger
against Kingston for disobeying her wishes in this matter. Among the
weak points of her character a lack of honesty could not always be
counted; she frankly acknowledged to herself that no fault could be
found with Ivor Restormel. Good, kind, companionable, nice-minded, he
appeared to be everything that she herself, by all the rules of her
code, should most warmly have liked and approved. This only made it the
odder, therefore, that she should feel against him so unconquerable a
secret dislike. Gundred almost felt as if it were not the boy himself
that she disliked, but some deep corner of his character which she
seemed to have known and dreaded for many years. She divined in him
a lurking enmity of which his own innocent and sunny nature was
altogether unconscious. But Gundred pulled herself up short at this
point, and refused to indulge in any such vain fantasies. People, it is
well known, do not contain these dual personalities; if Gundred dreaded
this boy, who, to all seeming, was everything sane and wholesome, her
feeling could have nothing to do with any nonsensical superstition, but
would certainly--if not sooner, then later--be disastrously shown to
have been founded on fact, by the discovery of its object’s carefully
hidden iniquity. Gundred, as the days went by, withdrew herself more
and more wholly from her husband’s life. Now she no longer took even a
formal share in it. She stood outside and watched for her opportunity
to strike at the intruder. That neither Kingston nor Gundred any
longer felt how completely they were removed from each other in itself
revealed the secret weakness which all these years had underlain the
smooth, firm surface of their relations. Each, it appeared, could do
perfectly well without the other, and only feel the separation as a
matter for indignant pride.
The interloper, meanwhile, was quite unconscious of the hidden passions
that were seething round him. Ivor Restormel had a happy temperament
that only looked for the best in everything. Reasons and explanations
did not interest him, nor had he much subtlety to discern any animosity
that did not take the form of a blow in the eye. So long as he was not
made to enter the smoke-haunted rooms of Brakelond he was inclined
simply and wholly to enjoy himself. What it all meant he had no idea,
nor what he had done to attract so smooth and pleasant a life as
seemed to be opening out before him. Occasionally he had a very faint
suspicion that Lady Gundred, for some reason, did not entirely approve
of him. But, then, she was always so mild and remote in manner, so it
must only be his fancy; after all, he had done absolutely nothing to
annoy her; and, anyway, what was the good of bothering? So he took
the pleasures that the gods provided, without question or cavil, and
began to enjoy the surroundings to which he had been so suddenly, so
unexpectedly, transplanted. He had inherited a love of beauty, comfort,
calm; the change from a penurious life spent between a third-rate
Oxford college and a dingy little house in the Banbury Road, among
people no less distasteful than the lives they led--the change from
all this to the large serenity of Brakelond was restful and delicious
in the extreme. Here voices were never raised in queribund tones;
here all the little difficulties of life were kept in oblivion, and
existence went on oiled wheels along a gentle, placid course. Lady
Gundred might be a little chilly and undemonstrative, but, at any rate,
she was always smooth; she never fussed or grew peevish, was never
worried about the details of housekeeping. Ivor Restormel loved the
unquestioning quiet of his new life. As for his host, well, there he
was altogether baffled.
Mr. Darnley seemed at once indifferent and enthusiastic about his new
secretary. At one moment he would talk eagerly, almost affectionately;
and then, again, he would be perfectly indefinite and tame in tone.
Ivor could not make it out at all; did Mr. Darnley like him or not?
Surely he must--surely he must even have taken a strange, violent
fancy to him. Otherwise, why should Mr. Darnley have made such rapid
advances; why should he have been so anxious to get him over to
Brakelond; why should he have been in such haste to offer him the
secretaryship, and so keen that he should take it? All these things
were proof of liking, if anything in the world could ever be. Yet Ivor
Restormel could never feel wholly satisfied, after all, that his host
had any personal feeling for him. In himself he even seemed to bore
Mr. Darnley. Ivor was quite acute enough to see before long that Mr.
Darnley took very little interest in him personally. And this made
the whole relation incalculably strange. Why saddle yourself, why go
out of your way to saddle yourself with a person for whom you do not
intrinsically care two straws? Ivor began to think that he even noticed
a certain animosity sometimes in his host’s attitude towards him. It
almost seemed as if by talking in his own person, of his own concerns,
that he was annoying and disappointing Mr. Darnley. What could this
mean? Mr. Darnley appeared to be always watching him, always listening
for some chance word from him. And then, all of a sudden, Mr. Darnley’s
interest would kindle and flame. Warmth would come into his manner,
and Ivor would get the sensation of being acutely liked. And then,
in a moment, perhaps, his talk would wander outside the range of its
listener’s interest. Mr. Darnley would shake his head with a sort of
desperate irritation, the light would die out of his eyes, and his
demeanour become cold, and sometimes even savage. Evidently the talker
must have somehow cheated him, must have ceased to say the things he
wished to hear. But what were those things? Ivor Restormel spurred
himself to unaccustomed subtlety; he disliked this sensation of being,
as it were, only spasmodically and vicariously cultivated. His face and
manners generally made him friends without difficulty; he was piqued by
their apparent failure to give him any victory over a man whom they had
seemed to lead so unresistingly captive at first sight.
Ivor exerted himself to ensure Mr. Darnley’s approval, and carefully
marked the moments which held his employer’s enthusiasm and the
subjects that provoked it. Apparently, though, any talk of his own
life and ideas was of no interest, or very little, to Mr. Darnley. And
how can one capture people’s friendship if they are obviously bored
by everything that concerns one’s self? No; not quite everything.
Ivor soon found that any talk about his particular private weaknesses
was always sure to rouse Mr. Darnley to a subdued, secret fury of
eagerness. As soon as Ivor dropped any chance apologetic word about
the terrors that he had so strangely inherited, and as long as he
continued telling of them, so long, and so long only, did Mr. Darnley
seem to have an interest and a liking for him--an interest wonderfully
keen, a liking deep and strong. And then, if he took advantage of
this evident friendship to go on to other matters, then the evident
friendship would immediately chill off and vanish into an annoyed
indifference. Mr. Darnley could not be touched by conversation on any
other topic. But that one topic was always sure of the most instant
success; it had only to hint its presence in the dialogue for Mr.
Darnley’s whole zeal to leap to the alert. Mr. Darnley even seemed to
be always watching for its appearance, and, what was strange and even
exasperating, would put up with hours of Ivor’s conversation in the
obvious hope that sooner or later the one matter of interest would
crop up into the talk. It is annoying to find one’s company cherished
only for the sake of conversation on one particular subject, and Ivor
began deliberately to avoid the topic, as much from hurt vanity as from
personal pride.
Then the situation developed even more oddly, for Mr. Darnley would
hardly let the boy out of his sight. He must be always at his side,
always putting up with what clearly failed to interest him, in the
persistent hope that as the delay grew longer and more wearisome, so
the reappearance of the one interesting topic must be coming nearer
and growing surer. He clung to Ivor’s company, although it plainly
had no intrinsic value for him, anxious not to lose a moment of it,
for fear the moment of true speech should come and pass without his
knowledge. Ivor, sweet-natured as he was, showed his resentment at the
topsy-turvy situation by talking persistently of things that concerned
himself, his daily life, or his employer’s. And it was even amusing,
had it not been rather humiliating, to notice how Mr. Darnley chafed
beneath the interminable ordeal, yet would not lose an instant of
it, lest in that instant the thing he was looking for so passionately
should poke its head up and vanish again unnoticed. But Ivor, for sheer
pride, would indulge him but seldom. Besides, it happened that the one
thing which Kingston wished to hear was also, naturally enough, the one
thing that Ivor least wished to tell. For the boy was acutely ashamed
of those idiotic instincts of terror with which his premature birth
had left him. The one thing worse than those terrors themselves was
the humiliation of acknowledging them. So he was doubly reluctant to
gratify the morbid curiosity of the older man.
Kingston, in fact, was paying very heavily for the indulgence of
his long desire. The situation, to him, was one persistent agony of
expectation, always straining, always being disappointed. Now at last
he understood the punishment that he had earned. For, by his own wish,
he was doomed to call, and call for ever, to something that could
never hear. The dead was free, but the living was still bound, was
more tightly bound than ever in that bond of desire which is at once
the pet pleasure and the dreadful agony of all who enter it. And a
dreary agony it was; Isabel was there, within his reach almost, but for
ever beyond his reach. No cry could rouse her, no appeal restore her
personality to life. And yet, mysteriously but certainly, she was there
once more; once more clothed in flesh, once more gazing out of human
eyes and speaking with a human voice. Nevertheless, for all the good
he could have of his prayer’s gratification, she might still have been
dead bones and dust of the earth. For she could not hear him, could not
recognise him, and the irony of her deaf, blind presence at his side
was a torment far more keen than all the long years of her absence. He
ravened and battered against the iron wall of her unconsciousness,
and for ever was beaten back, sickened, bruised and bleeding from the
violence--the eternally fruitless violence--of his effort to stir her
recollection. Her memory slept for ever in the dead past; only the
immortal part of her still lived, and was incurably deaf to any human
call. She did not hear him, she could not hear him; never, never, all
down the ages could she hear him again. The irremediable separation was
only made more ghastly, more appalling, by the tantalizing proximity of
her. He could see her, hear her, know her well. And all the knowledge
was not only profitless, but an aggravation of his misery. He saw
now what a fool he had been to tie himself anew in the bondage of
desire; an eternal parting would have been far less painful, far less
maddeningly cruel, than this grim and nugatory reunion.
Again and again he battled fiercely to win the recognition that he
knew in his heart of hearts to be for ever beyond his reach. He was
incessantly trying to lead Ivor Restormel into some discussion of his
secret terrors, hoping that so Isabel’s voice might speak once more,
and possibly, in time, Isabel’s self be aroused again. But the task was
hard, and Ivor reluctant to be made the mouthpiece of that inmost self
of his whose identity--whose very existence, even--he never suspected.
And then it was that Kingston found himself hating the boy. The boy
stood between himself and Isabel; for ever must stand between himself
and Isabel. And yet the boy contained the secret treasure--_was_, in
a worldly sense, the secret treasure; he could not have the one for a
neighbour without putting up with the presence of the other, without
keeping the boy for ever at his side, and tolerating endlessly the
revelations of the boy’s uninteresting personality. Kingston approved
of the young fellow well enough in himself; he was amiable, kind,
pleasant to look at and talk to. In ordinary circumstances Kingston
would have liked him and never thought twice about him. Now, however,
his liking was complicated by a resentment that at times deepened into
something like hate. The boy was keeping so much from him. It was not
the boy’s fault, of course, yet that did not make the situation any
easier to bear. He alternately liked and disliked him with a vigour for
which the boy’s own personality was entirely innocent.
He was always laying traps for him, watching him, trying to stir up the
spirit that possessed him. Gladly would Kingston have pierced between
Ivor and the secret thing that inhabited him. The one he valued not
at all, or only as containing the other which he now valued above
everything in the world, for ever beyond his reach though it was. He
resented the boy’s body, his beauty, his young developing nature which,
sooner or later, might be expected to conquer those old dim memories
and achieve the ultimate death of the Isabel he had known those twenty
years before. If he could have set free the sleeping soul he would
gladly have seen its new body break up and die. He hated that new body,
which made so impermeable a wall between himself and the vanished thing
he had so vainly found again. He looked on Ivor Restormel as an unarmed
burglar might look on an impregnable safe in which lies the diamond
of his ambition. The safe is precious and desirable because of the
diamond inside, but, in so far as it makes the diamond impregnable, is
doubly detestable for the very fact that the diamond _is_ inside. And
in Kingston’s case the problem was even crueller; for the burglar may,
with long labour, break the safe and attain the diamond. Kingston, in
breaking the safe, would by the same action cause the diamond to vanish
once more. As things stood, the safety--at all events, the continued
proximity--of the diamond depended entirely on the continued security
and inviolate condition of the safe.
He began soon, in his difficulty, to read up the countless Oriental
cases of prenatal memory. There, in the East, souls that have been
parted by bodily death are reunited in another shape, and know each
other and are happy. There the great facts of life, of that shadowy
fallacy that we call death, are clearly known and understood. But here
we are still driven by phantom fears, and troubled by that which has no
real existence except in our own weakened imaginations. Our memories
are too closely trammelled by false teaching, too little practised
and experienced, to pass intact across the blank interval of physical
death. At the best it is only an occasional glimpse we carry on into
another life, and even so those glimpses come but rarely, and fade as
our earthly life advances to maturity again. More people have these
glimpses, it is true, than ever dare to acknowledge them; but they are
little understood and never fairly made use of. It is to the East we
must go to see how little account the trained soul makes of physical
death. There, through innumerable ages, the light has been seen, and
memory has been educated from hour to hour and from day to day until
at last the soul finds it as easy to recall the events of a hundred
years ago as those of last night or this morning. Kingston studied the
many cases that the Eastern Gospel gives us, and which Western science
is just beginning to discern anew. Always he hoped against hope that
they would give him some key to unlock the house of memory. Yes, the
mortal body is just that--a house of memory, a jerry-built house at
best. But the lock is stern and stark. What key is there, what jemmy,
what crowbar, that can prevail on the lock that guards the house of
memories, can prevail, at least, without wrecking the house and letting
the memories go free once more?
Kingston had no hope that he could find such a key. The old Eastern
stories showed the glorified free memory as the possession only of
the free glorified soul that has escaped the bondage of desire. When
desire has passed away, then the uncontaminated soul knows no barrier
of time or space. But in the kingdom of desire are all the burning
pains and limitations which desire provides to scourge its devotees
in the very moment of their seeming satisfaction. To eyes desirous,
life is narrowed to a thing of the moment; it is only from the high
places of enlightenment that the opened eye of the Real Self can wander
over all the fields of existence, and see the nullity of death, the
eternity of truth and holiness, from bodily life to bodily life, until
at last the great goal is gained. Kingston saw himself helpless now
in the grip of the passion he had invoked. Nothing could satisfy it,
nothing could release him from it. Nothing but the death of his body,
and even that release seemed now to his awakening intelligence to be
but problematical. He began to wonder what could be the end of this
fantastic tangle. Days went by, and he found himself more tightly
chained to the agony of his perpetual disappointment in Ivor Restormel,
more cruelly hungry for the satisfaction which lay for ever in his
sight and beyond his reach, more and more fiercely stung by the misery
that he himself had brought upon himself.
He grew into a sense of drifting towards a catastrophe; the strain,
the torment could not be prolonged indefinitely without the sudden
snap of his endurance. Some thunderclap of fate must break up the
dreadful stagnation of this nightmare. As the time passed, and his
efforts brought him no nearer to fulfilment, made it increasingly plain
that he could never come any nearer to fulfilment, he felt the growing
imminence of doom. This companion who was no companion, his desire had
evoked It from the shadows, soon It must go back into the shadows from
which he had called It, having first accomplished fully the punishment
of his selfishness. He watched the human Ivor Restormel with a curious
consciousness of watching a thing unearthly, a thing moving amid
darkness towards a great darkness not so very far away. This boy, so
much alive, so content with life, was not in reality alive at all. He
was just a shadow, a faint film of personality, by comparison with the
old living thing that lurked in him. Vague and indeterminate as his own
character was, he was the penalty, made incarnate, of Kingston’s own
selfishness; he was the eidolon of the past projected into the present
in order to tantalize and damn the soul that had desired it. Built of
clouds, he must pass back ere long, swiftly, tragically into cloudland,
and that reality behind the clouds, that living fragment far down in
the shadowy personality of the boy, must pass onwards again on its
upward way--that strange immortal essence which once had been Isabel.
And this foreknowledge of the end, this sensation of drifting daily
more and more hurriedly towards something terrible, impelled him to
cherish with a more and more eager passion this presence that had been
vouchsafed to him, however incomplete, however unsatisfying he might
find it.
Each hour brought him nearer now to the last that should ever be.
He bent himself sternly, in the lessening time that was his, to the
desperate task of awakening recollection in a soul where recollection
slept for ever. Less and less did he see or think of Ivor Restormel,
more and more ardently, more and more despairingly, of the thing that
dwelt in Ivor Restormel, the thing that soon must leave its habitation
to pass elsewhere again. He sought the boy’s presence more and more
persistently, would never spare him out of his sight, exacted more and
more of his conversation. And all the while he was caring less and
less for the boy, his words, or his utterance. Now that he had found
out what it was that had attracted him to the boy, he was ceasing to
see the boy himself at all, to hear his earthly voice. All Kingston’s
attention was fixed on the glimpses that he could hope to get of the
secret presence he divined, his ears were open only to those occasional
flashes of memory that spoke in Ivor Restormel out of that remote past
beyond the grave. He must make the dreadful most of the short time that
was left him. It was but little he could hope to make, but the time, he
felt, was running rapidly out towards its end.
Gundred saw everything. Gundred understood nothing. That her husband
grew keener and keener to monopolize Ivor Restormel she saw, and
righteous anger became fiercer within her. That Kingston should so
slight her company as obviously and vehemently to prefer that of a
person against whom she had most solemnly warned him, was matter
enough and to spare for just wrath. Gundred grew colder and colder in
manner, lived more and more aloof, felt stronger and stronger in her
consciousness of justified dread. That Kingston clung every moment to
the side of his secretary she noticed; that, in reality, he did not
care two straws about his secretary she could hardly be expected to
discern. The plain and sufficing fact was that he never seemed happy,
never at his ease, unless Ivor Restormel were with him, and even then
he very rarely seemed perfectly satisfied either. Gundred saw that
there was something unusual and mysterious about this friendship
that in some ways scarcely seemed a friendship at all, yet made such
tremendous claims on time and company.
Gundred, scanning the situation from her retirement, came deliberately
to the conclusion that Kingston’s evident infatuation was the result
of some malign influence. Nothing else could account for his restless
attraction towards Ivor Restormel, combined so frequently with obvious
boredom and annoyance when in his company; nothing could so completely
explain the apparent innocuousness of Ivor himself, as compared with
the instinct of repulsion that Gundred always felt towards him, and
felt more fanatically from day to day. Gundred knew that she was not
capable of unjust or disorderly feelings. And, if she disliked people,
it meant that they deserved to be disliked. And if no reason for such a
dislike could be discovered anywhere in Ivor Restormel’s personality,
well, that only made it more clear that Gundred’s infallible instinct
was founded on her perception in him of some evil supernatural
influence, possessing him and working through him. The idea grew
and fermented in her brain, and heroic remedies began to suggest
themselves. No one, in these dreadful latter days, could seriously
doubt that the Evil One was abroad. What more credible than that he
should have picked out for attack a soul like her husband’s, which
Gundred knew to be weak in doctrine, and saw to be not impeccable in
practice? Gundred grew in the certainty that, whether Ivor Restormel
knew it or no, he was filled with unhallowed powers that were exerting
a wicked force on the man whom he had so uncannily attracted from the
first.
All her life’s course had led Gundred along placid, sunny ways,
and her nature, through those years, had revealed only the peace
and serenity of true refinement. And now, at last, at the touch of
this righteous jealousy, there began to stir in her the fierce old
blood of Queen Isabel, the stern harsh passions of the Mortimers. The
fanatic stirred in its long sleep, and Gundred felt herself inspired
to lead a domestic crusade against the Powers of Darkness. At any cost
her husband must be saved. In old days an Earl of March had, by his
laudable zeal in persecution, elicited commendatory letters from Queen
Mary. His spirit now awoke in Gundred, and she realized in herself the
strength to act mightily in a noble cause.
In every way this undesirable intruder, who seemed so amiable and
pleasant and desirable, was having the most untoward effect on
Kingston’s mind and morals. Had he not caused a hitherto blameless and
obedient husband to revolt against his wife’s righteous dominion after
twenty years of harmony, and to cast her wishes defiantly beneath his
feet? And now it became obvious that Kingston was suffering in other
ways. She saw him to be a dabbler in things best left alone, in things
unhallowed, Satanic, dreadful. Of his attendance on spirit-circles
Gundred luckily knew nothing, otherwise, in her determination to be
old-fashioned by contrast with the hysterical occultism that now
obtains, she would probably have wished to call in an exorcist. But
even in his reading he had strayed into improper paths. The strangest
things he was now for ever studying--Eastern books and mystical
fantasies of the most unsettling description. The weirdest of these
he made a point of reading to Ivor Restormel, and Gundred, who
generally insisted on being by, noticed that he seemed to read eagerly,
challengingly, as if in momentary expectation that the matter would
elicit some answering flash of some kind or another from the boy. It
never did, and the readings, therefore, always broke off short with a
shrug of disappointment and even of disgust; but Gundred divined a soul
in peril from the very attempt he made. It was surely an incantation he
was practising, an invocation to the mysterious evil thing that haunted
Ivor Restormel. She presented a bold front to such dangers, and would
not be kept away from the readings.
Kingston one Sunday evening seemed absorbed in his dubious books,
while Gundred sat at her knitting, an employment by which she piously
signalized the Sabbath. All through the week she did fine needlework,
but on Sunday she put away her embroideries and conscientiously knitted
comforters for the Deep-sea Fishermen. But suddenly Kingston looked
up from his page, and began to read in a curious tone of watchful
defiance, addressing his secretary, who was inoffensively engaged with
a newspaper. ‘Listen to this, Ivor,’ he began, ‘listen to this, and
tell me what you think of it.’ Gundred, in her observant silence, noted
that her opinion was not asked, and her wrath grew greater and more
righteous, chalking up yet another item to the Evil One’s account.
‘“Once upon a time,”’ read Kingston, ‘“many thousands of years ago,
there came a great Buddha to a city in India. He was a great and
glorious Buddha, but the time is so very far away now that even his
name has passed into Nirvana, and cannot be recalled. But all the
people in the city wrought their hardest to do him honour. From the
King and his nobles downward everyone gave his richest silks and rugs
to line the road of the Holy One’s arrival, and in all their land there
was not a widow or a little child so poor that they had not some bright
pebble or piece of cloth to do their small homage to the Incarnate
Perfection. Only one shepherd lad, from the jungle beyond, had nothing
to give. He was young and strong and very beautiful, and his whole
soul cried out in worship of the Buddha. The most splendid jewel in
the world, the most priceless tapestry and cloth of gold, he would not
have thought good enough for the honouring of the Holy One; and yet he
had nothing, no treasure, however humble, that he could throw beneath
the blessed feet. He, that would have given half the world, had not so
much as a handful of painted shells. So his heart was very heavy within
him, and sadly did he draw near to the city on the appointed day. And
on his road there met him a maiden, lovely and gracious, that wore in
her hair a flower. But this was such a flower as the boy had never seen
before. It was altogether radiant and heavenly, splendid beyond the
imagination of man to conceive. It grew in a cluster of seven blooms,
and the fragrance of it filled the jungle. If he could only have this
wonderful thing to offer to the Heavenly Visitor, then, indeed, thought
the boy, he would at least have done no dishonour to the Light that his
heart honoured above all else on earth. ‘Maiden,’ he said, ‘for what
price will you sell me the flower that you wear in your hair?’ And she
answered that for a very great price she would sell him two blossoms
from the cluster. And once again his heart was daunted, for the price
she asked was more than anything that he could hope to get together in
a long laborious life. He shook his head. ‘I had desired,’ he replied,
‘to do fitting honour to the Holy One, but I see now that that hope is
beyond me.’ Then the maiden took the blossom from her hair and held it
out towards him, for her eyes were opened. ‘My Lord,’ she answered to
the peasant lad, ‘my sight is unsealed, and I can see. Very many years
hence--a thousand years hence--I see that you, in the fullness of
time, even you yourself shall become a revealed Buddha here on earth.
Take this flower of mine, then, without money and without price, but
promise me only that in that far day I may stand at your right hand and
be near you in your glory.’ And the boy smiled and gave her his word.
So after all he had his offering to lay before the Blessed One, and
his heart was satisfied. And the maiden went her way through life, and
on through the many deaths that lay beyond. And he also, the peasant
lad, died in the ripeness of his age, and lived and died through many
generations, advancing always on the upward road. And at length the
time was accomplished, and the maiden’s prophecy fulfilled. For the
peasant lad became the Spotless One, the Buddha Sakhya-Muni, High and
Holy, altogether Blessed and Perfect, the Best Friend of All the World.
And in that day, the maiden found herself again, and came at last to
her reward. For she was the Lady Yasodhara, his wife, the first of all
the sacred women that trod the happy way and entered into light....”’
Kingston ceased, his voice filled with interrogation, pausing eagerly
for Ivor’s opinion, hoping against hope that that opinion might be more
illuminating than he felt it would be. Again and again had he tried to
kindle that dormant consciousness with scenes like this, always keenly
hoping that they would touch some chord of understanding far down in
the hidden depths of the boy’s dual personality. But the hope was never
to be fulfilled; he knew it was never to be fulfilled, yet each fresh
disappointment was sharper and more wounding than the last. Kingston
paused for a comment on the story. None came. After a pause he demanded
one.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what did you think of that, Ivor?’
The boy looked up; his attention, though formally yielded to
Kingston’s reading, had, in reality, been surreptitiously concentrated
on the sporting column of the paper he held in his hand.
‘What did I think of it?’ he repeated a trifle vaguely. ‘Oh, not half
bad. Quite a decent bit of writing. But awful rot, sir, of course.’
Kingston vibrated with acute annoyance. Thus, for the thousandth time,
the gate of possibilities had been slammed brutally in his face by the
uninteresting shadowy, rudimentary soul that shared Ivor Restormel’s
body with that wonderful immortal dead. He gazed at the boy with
positive hatred in his eyes. In a spasm of irritation Kingston turned
towards his wife.
‘And you, Gundred,’ he inquired, ‘what do you think of it? Evidently
Ivor hasn’t the faintest notion what it is all about. It says nothing
to him. Does it say anything to you?’
‘Very dreadful and unchristian,’ said Gundred firmly, but mildly. ‘I
wonder you can bear to read such things. I am sure it cannot be good
for Mr. Restormel to hear them.’
Kingston might talk if he pleased of ‘Ivor,’ Gundred pointed her
disapproval by adhering rigidly to the formal mode of address,
and would never accord her enemy the favour of any more friendly
appellation.
‘Mr. Restormel,’ she repeated decisively, ‘could not be expected to see
anything in such irreverent nonsense.’
Kingston could not trust himself to answer her, nor to make any further
remark on the abysmal stupidity of the boy who stood so perpetually
between him and the memory of Isabel. Hurriedly turning over the pages,
he began to read that most wonderful scene in history, the second
meeting of the triumphant Buddha with Yasodhara his wife, after those
many years of parting and glorification. Both the world’s great Buddha
stories contain the tragedy of a woman; but the tale of the Indian
Princess, widowed through long earthly years of the man she loved, and
then, in the end, reunited with the Perfected Incarnation of Holiness,
is even more tremendous, if less physically poignant, than that of
the Mother who stood on Calvary. Mystical, majestic, splendid, is the
crowning moment in the life of Yasodhara, and Kingston read the words
that relate it with a passionate sense of the truth that they convey.
Then he fell silent.
‘Very pretty, dear,’ said Gundred. ‘Would you pick up my wool for me?
Thanks. But I do think one might find something more profitable to read
on Sundays. I think one ought to make Sunday different somehow, from
other days, and not read novels and things like that. One should only
read _real_ things on Sundays--yes?’
She slipped into sight the volume with which she occasionally beguiled
the devout labours of her knitting. With a gentle little air of
excellence she laid it down again unostentatiously, but so that the
gilt lettering showed along its cover. It was the ‘Life of Bishop
Boffatt,’ by Three Nieces, with a ‘Foreword’ from Archdeacon Widge.