Part 27 (1/2)
Not a trace of the original Italian house remained. The loggia had been replaced by a couple of Gothic towers. Over the central hall he had placed a light lantern roof, and the billiard-room had been converted into a chapel. A cold and corpse-like sky was flying; the shadows falling filled the autumn path with sensations of deep melancholy. But the painted legend of St. George overthrowing the dragon, which John had placed in commemoration of his victories over himself, in the central hall, glowed full of colour and story; and in the melodious moan of the organ, and in the resonant chord which closes the awful warning of the _Dies Irae_, he realized the soul of his friend. Castle, window, and friend were now one in his brain, and seized with dim, undefinable weariness of his companions, and an irritating longing to see John, Mike said--
”I must go and see him.”
”We can't wait here while you are paying visits; who doesn't like getting drunk or singing, 'What cheer, Ria?' Let's give him a song.”
Then the whole coach roared: even the bar-girls joined in.
”What cheer, Ria?
Ria's on the job; What cheer, Ria?
Speculate a bob.”
As soon as he could make himself heard, Mike said--
”You need not wait for me. We are only five minutes from Brighton.
I'll ride over in an hour's time. Do you wait for me at the s.h.i.+p, Kitty.”
”I don't think this at all nice of you.”
Mike waved his hand; and as he stood on the steps of this Gothic mansion, listening to the chant, watching the revellers disappearing in the gray and yellow gloom of the park, he said--
”The man here is the one who has seized what is best in life; he alone has loved. I should have founded with him a new religious order. I should walk with him at the head of the choir. Bah! life is too pitifully short. I should like to taste of every pleasure--of every emotion; and what have I tasted? Nothing. I have done nothing.
I have wheedled a few women who wanted to be wheedled, that is all.”
CHAPTER IX
”And how are you, old chap? I am delighted to see you.”
”I'm equally glad to see you. You have made alterations in the place ... I came down from London with a lot of Johnnies and tarts--Kitty Carew, Laura Stanley and her sister. I got d.i.c.ky the driver to turn in here. You were playing the _Dies Irae_. I never was more impressed in my life. You should have seen the coach beneath the great window ... St. George overcoming the Johnnies ... the tumult of the organ ...
and I couldn't stand singing 'Two Lovely Black Eyes.' I sickened of them--the whole thing--and I felt I must see you.”
”And are they outside?”
”No; they have gone off.”
Relieved of fear of intrusion, John laughed loudly, and commented humorously on the spectacle of the Brighton coach filled with revellers drawn up beneath his window. Then, to discuss the window--the quality of the gla.s.s--he turned out the lamps; the hall filled with the legend, and their hearts full of it, and delighting in the sensation of each other, they walked up and down the echoing hall. John remembered a certain fugue by Bach, and motioning to the page to blow, he seated himself at the key-board. The celestial s.h.i.+eld and crest still remained in little colour. Mike saw John's hands moving over the key-board, and his soul went out in wors.h.i.+p of that soul, divided from the world's pleasure, self-sufficing, alone; seeking G.o.d only in his home of organ fugue and legended pane. He understood the n.o.bleness and purity which was now about him--it seemed impossible to him to return to Kitty.
Swift and complete reaction had come upon him, and choked with the moral sulphur of the last twenty-four hours, he craved the breath of purity. He must talk of Plato's _Republic_, of Wagner's operas, of Schopenhauer; even Lily was not now so imperative as these; and next day, after lunch, when the question of his departure was alluded to, Mike felt it was impossible to leave John; but persecuted with scruples of disloyalty to Kitty, he resisted his friend's invitation to stay. He urged he had no clothes. John offered to send the coachman into Brighton for what he wanted.
”But perhaps you have no money,” John said, inadvertently, and a look of apprehension pa.s.sed into his face.
”Oh, I have plenty of money--'tisn't that. I haven't told you that a friend of mine, a lady, has left me nearly five thousand a year. I don't think you ever saw her--Lady Seeley.”
John burst into uncontrollable laughter. ”That is the best thing I ever heard in all my life. I don't think I ever heard anything that amused me more. The grotesqueness of the whole thing.” Seeing that Mike was annoyed he hastened to explain his mirth. ”The inexplicableness of human action always amuses me; the inexplicable is romance, at least that is the only way I can understand romance.
When you reduce life to a logical sequence you destroy all poetry, and, I think, all reality. We do things constantly, and no one can say why we do them. Frederick the Great coming in, after reviewing his troops, to play the flute, that to me is intensely romantic. A lady, whom you probably treated exceedingly badly, leaving you her property, that too is, to me.”
Admonished by his conscience, John's hilarity clouded into a sort of semi-humorous gravity, and he advised Mike on the necessity of reforming his life.