VI

“IT goes on too much abroad—hang abroad!” These or something like them

had been the Master’s remarkable words in relation to the action of

“Ginistrella”; and yet, though they had made a sharp impression on the

author of that work, like almost all spoken words from the same source,

he a week after the conversation I have noted left England for a long

absence and full of brave intentions. It is not a perversion of the

truth to pronounce that encounter the direct cause of his departure. If

the oral utterance of the eminent writer had the privilege of moving him

deeply it was especially on his turning it over at leisure, hours and

days later, that it appeared to yield him its full meaning and exhibit

its extreme importance. He spent the summer in Switzerland and, having

in September begun a new task, determined not to cross the Alps till he

should have made a good start. To this end he returned to a quiet corner

he knew well, on the edge of the Lake of Geneva and within sight of the

towers of Chillon: a region and a view for which he had an affection that

sprang from old associations and was capable of mysterious revivals and

refreshments. Here he lingered late, till the snow was on the nearer

hills, almost down to the limit to which he could climb when his stint,

on the shortening afternoons, was performed. The autumn was fine, the

lake was blue and his book took form and direction. These felicities,

for the time, embroidered his life, which he suffered to cover him with

its mantle. At the end of six weeks he felt he had learnt St. George’s

lesson by heart, had tested and proved its doctrine. Nevertheless he did

a very inconsistent thing: before crossing the Alps he wrote to Marian

Fancourt. He was aware of the perversity of this act, and it was only as

a luxury, an amusement, the reward of a strenuous autumn, that he

justified it. She had asked of him no such favour when, shortly before

he left London, three days after their dinner in Ennismore Gardens, he

went to take leave of her. It was true she had had no ground—he hadn’t

named his intention of absence. He had kept his counsel for want of due

assurance: it was that particular visit that was, the next thing, to

settle the matter. He had paid the visit to see how much he really cared

for her, and quick departure, without so much as an explicit farewell,

was the sequel to this enquiry, the answer to which had created within

him a deep yearning. When he wrote her from Clarens he noted that he

owed her an explanation (more than three months after!) for not having

told her what he was doing.

She replied now briefly but promptly, and gave him a striking piece of

news: that of the death, a week before, of Mrs. St. George. This

exemplary woman had succumbed, in the country, to a violent attack of

inflammation of the lungs—he would remember that for a long time she had

been delicate. Miss Fancourt added that she believed her husband

overwhelmed by the blow; he would miss her too terribly—she had been

everything in life to him. Paul Overt, on this, immediately wrote to St.

George. He would from the day of their parting have been glad to remain

in communication with him, but had hitherto lacked the right excuse for

troubling so busy a man. Their long nocturnal talk came back to him in

every detail, but this was no bar to an expression of proper sympathy

with the head of the profession, for hadn’t that very talk made it clear

that the late accomplished lady was the influence that ruled his life?

What catastrophe could be more cruel than the extinction of such an

influence? This was to be exactly the tone taken by St. George in

answering his young friend upwards of a month later. He made no allusion

of course to their important discussion. He spoke of his wife as frankly

and generously as if he had quite forgotten that occasion, and the

feeling of deep bereavement was visible in his words. “She took

everything off my hands—off my mind. She carried on our life with the

greatest art, the rarest devotion, and I was free, as few men can have

been, to drive my pen, to shut myself up with my trade. This was a rare

service—the highest she could have rendered me. Would I could have

acknowledged it more fitly!”

A certain bewilderment, for our hero, disengaged itself from these

remarks: they struck him as a contradiction, a retractation, strange on

the part of a man who hadn’t the excuse of witlessness. He had certainly

not expected his correspondent to rejoice in the death of his wife, and

it was perfectly in order that the rupture of a tie of more than twenty

years should have left him sore. But if she had been so clear a blessing

what in the name of consistency had the dear man meant by turning him

upside down that night—by dosing him to that degree, at the most

sensitive hour of his life, with the doctrine of renunciation? If Mrs.

St. George was an irreparable loss, then her husband’s inspired advice

had been a bad joke and renunciation was a mistake. Overt was on the

point of rushing back to London to show that, for his part, he was

perfectly willing to consider it so, and he went so far as to take the

manuscript of the first chapters of his new book out of his table-drawer,

to insert it into a pocket of his portmanteau. This led to his catching

a glimpse of certain pages he hadn’t looked at for months, and that

accident, in turn, to his being struck with the high promise they

revealed—a rare result of such retrospections, which it was his habit to

avoid as much as possible: they usually brought home to him that the glow

of composition might be a purely subjective and misleading emotion. On

this occasion a certain belief in himself disengaged itself whimsically

from the serried erasures of his first draft, making him think it best

after all to pursue his present trial to the end. If he could write as

well under the rigour of privation it might be a mistake to change the

conditions before that spell had spent itself. He would go back to

London of course, but he would go back only when he should have finished

his book. This was the vow he privately made, restoring his manuscript

to the table-drawer. It may be added that it took him a long time to

finish his book, for the subject was as difficult as it was fine, and he

was literally embarrassed by the fulness of his notes. Something within

him warned him that he must make it supremely good—otherwise he should

lack, as regards his private behaviour, a handsome excuse. He had a

horror of this deficiency and found himself as firm as need be on the

question of the lamp and the file. He crossed the Alps at last and spent

the winter, the spring, the ensuing summer, in Italy, where still, at the

end of a twelvemonth, his task was unachieved. “Stick to it—see it

through”: this general injunction of St. George’s was good also for the

particular case. He applied it to the utmost, with the result that when

in its slow order the summer had come round again he felt he had given

all that was in him. This time he put his papers into his portmanteau,

with the address of his publisher attached, and took his way northward.

He had been absent from London for two years—two years which, seeming to

count as more, had made such a difference in his own life—through the

production of a novel far stronger, he believed, than “Ginistrella”—that

he turned out into Piccadilly, the morning after his arrival, with a

vague expectation of changes, of finding great things had happened. But

there were few transformations in Piccadilly—only three or four big red

houses where there had been low black ones—and the brightness of the end

of June peeped through the rusty railings of the Green Park and glittered

in the varnish of the rolling carriages as he had seen it in other, more

cursory Junes. It was a greeting he appreciated; it seemed friendly and

pointed, added to the exhilaration of his finished book, of his having

his own country and the huge oppressive amusing city that suggested

everything, that contained everything, under his hand again. “Stay at

home and do things here—do subjects we can measure,” St. George had said;

and now it struck him he should ask nothing better than to stay at home

for ever. Late in the afternoon he took his way to Manchester Square,

looking out for a number he hadn’t forgotten. Miss Fancourt, however,

was not at home, so that he turned rather dejectedly from the door. His

movement brought him face to face with a gentleman just approaching it

and recognised on another glance as Miss Fancourt’s father. Paul saluted

this personage, and the General returned the greeting with his customary

good manner—a manner so good, however, that you could never tell whether

it meant he placed you. The disappointed caller felt the impulse to

address him; then, hesitating, became both aware of having no particular

remark to make, and convinced that though the old soldier remembered him

he remembered him wrong. He therefore went his way without computing the

irresistible effect his own evident recognition would have on the

General, who never neglected a chance to gossip. Our young man’s face

was expressive, and observation seldom let it pass. He hadn’t taken ten

steps before he heard himself called after with a friendly

semi-articulate “Er—I beg your pardon!” He turned round and the General,

smiling at him from the porch, said: “Won’t you come in? I won’t leave

you the advantage of me!” Paul declined to come in, and then felt

regret, for Miss Fancourt, so late in the afternoon, might return at any

moment. But her father gave him no second chance; he appeared mainly to

wish not to have struck him as ungracious. A further look at the visitor

had recalled something, enough at least to enable him to say: “You’ve

come back, you’ve come back?” Paul was on the point of replying that he

had come back the night before, but he suppressed, the next instant, this

strong light on the immediacy of his visit and, giving merely a general

assent, alluded to the young lady he deplored not having found. He had

come late in the hope she would be in. “I’ll tell her—I’ll tell her,”

said the old man; and then he added quickly, gallantly: “You’ll be giving

us something new? It’s a long time, isn’t it?” Now he remembered him

right.

“Rather long. I’m very slow.” Paul explained. “I met you at Summersoft

a long time ago.”

“Oh yes—with Henry St. George. I remember very well. Before his poor

wife—” General Fancourt paused a moment, smiling a little less. “I dare

say you know.”

“About Mrs. St. George’s death? Certainly—I heard at the time.”

“Oh no, I mean—I mean he’s to be married.”

“Ah I’ve not heard that!” But just as Paul was about to add “To whom?”

the General crossed his intention.

“When did you come back? I know you’ve been away—by my daughter. She

was very sorry. You ought to give her something new.”

“I came back last night,” said our young man, to whom something had

occurred which made his speech for the moment a little thick.

“Ah most kind of you to come so soon. Couldn’t you turn up at dinner?”

“At dinner?” Paul just mechanically repeated, not liking to ask whom St.

George was going to marry, but thinking only of that.

“There are several people, I believe. Certainly St. George. Or

afterwards if you like better. I believe my daughter expects—” He

appeared to notice something in the visitor’s raised face (on his steps

he stood higher) which led him to interrupt himself, and the interruption

gave him a momentary sense of awkwardness, from which he sought a quick

issue. “Perhaps then you haven’t heard she’s to be married.”

Paul gaped again. “To be married?”

“To Mr. St. George—it has just been settled. Odd marriage, isn’t it?”

Our listener uttered no opinion on this point: he only continued to

stare. “But I dare say it will do—she’s so awfully literary!” said the

General.

Paul had turned very red. “Oh it’s a surprise—very interesting, very

charming! I’m afraid I can’t dine—so many thanks!”

“Well, you must come to the wedding!” cried the General. “Oh I remember

that day at Summersoft. He’s a great man, you know.”

“Charming—charming!” Paul stammered for retreat. He shook hands with the

General and got off. His face was red and he had the sense of its

growing more and more crimson. All the evening at home—he went straight

to his rooms and remained there dinnerless—his cheek burned at intervals

as if it had been smitten. He didn’t understand what had happened to

him, what trick had been played him, what treachery practised. “None,

none,” he said to himself. “I’ve nothing to do with it. I’m out of

it—it’s none of my business.” But that bewildered murmur was followed

again and again by the incongruous ejaculation: “Was it a plan—was it a

plan?” Sometimes he cried to himself, breathless, “Have I been duped,

sold, swindled?” If at all, he was an absurd, an abject victim. It was

as if he hadn’t lost her till now. He had renounced her, yes; but that

was another affair—that was a closed but not a locked door. Now he

seemed to see the door quite slammed in his face. Did he expect her to

wait—was she to give him his time like that: two years at a stretch? He

didn’t know what he had expected—he only knew what he hadn’t. It wasn’t

this—it wasn’t this. Mystification bitterness and wrath rose and boiled

in him when he thought of the deference, the devotion, the credulity with

which he had listened to St. George. The evening wore on and the light

was long; but even when it had darkened he remained without a lamp. He

had flung himself on the sofa, where he lay through the hours with his

eyes either closed or gazing at the gloom, in the attitude of a man

teaching himself to bear something, to bear having been made a fool of.

He had made it too easy—that idea passed over him like a hot wave.

Suddenly, as he heard eleven o’clock strike, he jumped up, remembering

what General Fancourt had said about his coming after dinner. He’d

go—he’d see her at least; perhaps he should see what it meant. He felt

as if some of the elements of a hard sum had been given him and the

others were wanting: he couldn’t do his sum till he had got all his

figures.

He dressed and drove quickly, so that by half-past eleven he was at

Manchester Square. There were a good many carriages at the door—a party

was going on; a circumstance which at the last gave him a slight relief,

for now he would rather see her in a crowd. People passed him on the

staircase; they were going away, going “on” with the hunted herdlike

movement of London society at night. But sundry groups remained in the

drawing-room, and it was some minutes, as she didn’t hear him announced,

before he discovered and spoke to her. In this short interval he had

seen St. George talking to a lady before the fireplace; but he at once

looked away, feeling unready for an encounter, and therefore couldn’t be

sure the author of “Shadowmere” noticed him. At all events he didn’t

come over though Miss Fancourt did as soon as she saw him—she almost

rushed at him, smiling rustling radiant beautiful. He had forgotten what

her head, what her face offered to the sight; she was in white, there

were gold figures on her dress and her hair was a casque of gold. He saw

in a single moment that she was happy, happy with an aggressive

splendour. But she wouldn’t speak to him of that, she would speak only

of himself.

“I’m so delighted; my father told me. How kind of you to come!” She

struck him as so fresh and brave, while his eyes moved over her, that he

said to himself irresistibly: “Why to him, why not to youth, to strength,

to ambition, to a future? Why, in her rich young force, to failure, to

abdication to superannuation?” In his thought at that sharp moment he

blasphemed even against all that had been left of his faith in the

peccable Master. “I’m so sorry I missed you,” she went on. “My father

told me. How charming of you to have come so soon!”

“Does that surprise you?” Paul Overt asked.

“The first day? No, from you—nothing that’s nice.” She was interrupted

by a lady who bade her good-night, and he seemed to read that it cost her

nothing to speak to him in that tone; it was her old liberal lavish way,

with a certain added amplitude that time had brought; and if this manner

began to operate on the spot, at such a juncture in her history, perhaps

in the other days too it had meant just as little or as much—a mere

mechanical charity, with the difference now that she was satisfied, ready

to give but in want of nothing. Oh she was satisfied—and why shouldn’t

she be? Why shouldn’t she have been surprised at his coming the first

day—for all the good she had ever got from him? As the lady continued to

hold her attention Paul turned from her with a strange irritation in his

complicated artistic soul and a sort of disinterested disappointment.

She was so happy that it was almost stupid—a disproof of the

extraordinary intelligence he had formerly found in her. Didn’t she know

how bad St. George could be, hadn’t she recognised the awful thinness—?

If she didn’t she was nothing, and if she did why such an insolence of

serenity? This question expired as our young man’s eyes settled at last

on the genius who had advised him in a great crisis. St. George was

still before the chimney-piece, but now he was alone—fixed, waiting, as

if he meant to stop after every one—and he met the clouded gaze of the

young friend so troubled as to the degree of his right (the right his

resentment would have enjoyed) to regard himself as a victim. Somehow

the ravage of the question was checked by the Master’s radiance. It was

as fine in its way as Marian Fancourt’s, it denoted the happy human

being; but also it represented to Paul Overt that the author of

“Shadowmere” had now definitely ceased to count—ceased to count as a

writer. As he smiled a welcome across the place he was almost banal, was

almost smug. Paul fancied that for a moment he hesitated to make a

movement, as if for all the world he _had_ his bad conscience; then they

had already met in the middle of the room and had shaken

hands—expressively, cordially on St. George’s part. With which they had

passed back together to where the elder man had been standing, while St.

George said: “I hope you’re never going away again. I’ve been dining

here; the General told me.” He was handsome, he was young, he looked as

if he had still a great fund of life. He bent the friendliest, most

unconfessing eyes on his disciple of a couple of years before; asked him

about everything, his health, his plans, his late occupations, the new

book. “When will it be out—soon, soon, I hope? Splendid, eh? That’s

right; you’re a comfort, you’re a luxury! I’ve read you all over again

these last six months.” Paul waited to see if he would tell him what the

General had told him in the afternoon and what Miss Fancourt, verbally at

least, of course hadn’t. But as it didn’t come out he at last put the

question.

“Is it true, the great news I hear—that you’re to be married?”

“Ah you have heard it then?”

“Didn’t the General tell you?” Paul asked.

The Master’s face was wonderful. “Tell me what?”

“That he mentioned it to me this afternoon?”

“My dear fellow, I don’t remember. We’ve been in the midst of people.

I’m sorry, in that case, that I lose the pleasure, myself, of announcing

to you a fact that touches me so nearly. It _is_ a fact, strange as it

may appear. It has only just become one. Isn’t it ridiculous?” St.

George made this speech without confusion, but on the other hand, so far

as our friend could judge, without latent impudence. It struck his

interlocutor that, to talk so comfortably and coolly, he must simply have

forgotten what had passed between them. His next words, however, showed

he hadn’t, and they produced, as an appeal to Paul’s own memory, an

effect which would have been ludicrous if it hadn’t been cruel. “Do you

recall the talk we had at my house that night, into which Miss Fancourt’s

name entered? I’ve often thought of it since.”

“Yes; no wonder you said what you did”—Paul was careful to meet his eyes.

“In the light of the present occasion? Ah but there was no light then.

How could I have foreseen this hour?”

“Didn’t you think it probable?”

“Upon my honour, no,” said Henry St. George. “Certainly I owe you that

assurance. Think how my situation has changed.”

“I see—I see,” our young man murmured.

His companion went on as if, now that the subject had been broached, he

was, as a person of imagination and tact, quite ready to give every

satisfaction—being both by his genius and his method so able to enter

into everything another might feel. “But it’s not only that; for

honestly, at my age, I never dreamed—a widower with big boys and with so

little else! It has turned out differently from anything one could have

dreamed, and I’m fortunate beyond all measure. She has been so free, and

yet she consents. Better than any one else perhaps—for I remember how

you liked her before you went away, and how she liked you—you can

intelligently congratulate me.”

“She has been so free!” Those words made a great impression on Paul

Overt, and he almost writhed under that irony in them as to which it so

little mattered whether it was designed or casual. Of course she had

been free, and appreciably perhaps by his own act; for wasn’t the

Master’s allusion to her having liked him a part of the irony too? “I

thought that by your theory you disapproved of a writer’s marrying.”

“Surely—surely. But you don’t call me a writer?”

“You ought to be ashamed,” said Paul.

“Ashamed of marrying again?”

“I won’t say that—but ashamed of your reasons.”

The elder man beautifully smiled. “You must let me judge of them, my

good friend.”

“Yes; why not? For you judged wonderfully of mine.”

The tone of these words appeared suddenly, for St. George, to suggest the

unsuspected. He stared as if divining a bitterness. “Don’t you think

I’ve been straight?”

“You might have told me at the time perhaps.”

“My dear fellow, when I say I couldn’t pierce futurity—!”

“I mean afterwards.”

The Master wondered. “After my wife’s death?”

“When this idea came to you.”

“Ah never, never! I wanted to save you, rare and precious as you are.”

Poor Overt looked hard at him. “Are you marrying Miss Fancourt to save

me?”

“Not absolutely, but it adds to the pleasure. I shall be the making of

you,” St. George smiled. “I was greatly struck, after our talk, with the

brave devoted way you quitted the country, and still more perhaps with

your force of character in remaining abroad. You’re very strong—you’re

wonderfully strong.”

Paul tried to sound his shining eyes; the strange thing was that he

seemed sincere—not a mocking fiend. He turned away, and as he did so

heard the Master say something about his giving them all the proof, being

the joy of his old age. He faced him again, taking another look. “Do

you mean to say you’ve stopped writing?”

“My dear fellow, of course I have. It’s too late. Didn’t I tell you?”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Of course you can’t—with your own talent! No, no; for the rest of my

life I shall only read _you_.”

“Does she know that—Miss Fancourt?”

“She will—she will.” Did he mean this, our young man wondered, as a

covert intimation that the assistance he should derive from that young

lady’s fortune, moderate as it was, would make the difference of putting

it in his power to cease to work ungratefully an exhausted vein?

Somehow, standing there in the ripeness of his successful manhood, he

didn’t suggest that any of his veins were exhausted. “Don’t you remember

the moral I offered myself to you that night as pointing?” St. George

continued. “Consider at any rate the warning I am at present.”

This was too much—he _was_ the mocking fiend. Paul turned from him with

a mere nod for good-night and the sense in a sore heart that he might

come back to him and his easy grace, his fine way of arranging things,

some time in the far future, but couldn’t fraternise with him now. It

was necessary to his soreness to believe for the hour in the intensity of

his grievance—all the more cruel for its not being a legal one. It was

doubtless in the attitude of hugging this wrong that he descended the

stairs without taking leave of Miss Fancourt, who hadn’t been in view at

the moment he quitted the room. He was glad to get out into the honest

dusky unsophisticating night, to move fast, to take his way home on foot.

He walked a long time, going astray, paying no attention. He was

thinking of too many other things. His steps recovered their direction,

however, and at the end of an hour he found himself before his door in

the small inexpensive empty street. He lingered, questioning himself

still before going in, with nothing around and above him but moonless

blackness, a bad lamp or two and a few far-away dim stars. To these last

faint features he raised his eyes; he had been saying to himself that he

should have been “sold” indeed, diabolically sold, if now, on his new

foundation, at the end of a year, St. George were to put forth something

of his prime quality—something of the type of “Shadowmere” and finer than

his finest. Greatly as he admired his talent Paul literally hoped such

an incident wouldn’t occur; it seemed to him just then that he shouldn’t

be able to bear it. His late adviser’s words were still in his

ears—“You’re very strong, wonderfully strong.” Was he really? Certainly

he would have to be, and it might a little serve for revenge. _Is_ he?

the reader may ask in turn, if his interest has followed the perplexed

young man so far. The best answer to that perhaps is that he’s doing his

best, but that it’s too soon to say. When the new book came out in the

autumn Mr. and Mrs. St. George found it really magnificent. The former

still has published nothing but Paul doesn’t even yet feel safe. I may

say for him, however, that if this event were to occur he would really be

the very first to appreciate it: which is perhaps a proof that the Master

was essentially right and that Nature had dedicated him to intellectual,

not to personal passion.