The Far Horizon

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He grew furiously red, gladness and embarrassment struggling within him.
Conscientiously he strove to be faithful to the menagerie of ignorances
and prejudices which he misnamed his convictions. For here was the
representative of the Accursed Thing--persecutor, enemy of truth, of
patriotism, of marriage, worshipper of senseless idols; but, alas! how he
loved that representative! How he honoured his intelligence, admired his
person, coveted his companionship! Beholding Iglesias once again, George
Lovegrove rejoiced as at the finding of lost treasure. Hence, perplexed,
perspiring, lamentably squinting, yet with the innocent half-shy ecstasy
of a girl looking upon her recovered lover, he gazed up into Mr. Iglesias'
face.

"I give you my word I was never more taken aback in my life," he
protested. "As it happened I was just thinking about old times, observing
that some family is moving into your former house. But I had no notion of
meeting you. Positively I am unable to grasp the fact. I have not a word
to say to you, because I require to say so much. I know there is a great
deal which needs explanation on my part. And then your calling me by my
name, too! I declare it went right through me, as a voice from the grave
might."

"Put aside explanations," Iglesias replied indulgently. "You are not going
to quarrel with me any more--let that suffice."

"No, I cannot quarrel with you any more. I am sure I don't know whether it
is unprincipled or not, but I cannot do it."

Regardless of observation, he pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his
face.

"If it is unprincipled I must just let it go." he said, quite recklessly.
"I cannot help myself. I give you my word, Dominic, I have held out as
long as I could."

This appeal to Iglesias, as against himself, appeared to him abundantly
unaffected and ingenuous.

"I cannot but believe you will find the consequences of renewed
intercourse with me less damaging than you suppose," he answered, smiling.

"That is what the wife says," the other man stated. "She has veered round
completely in her opinion, has the wife. I do not understand why, except
that Mrs. Porcher and Miss Hart and she seem to have fallen out. The
workings of females' minds are very difficult to follow, even after years
of marriage, you know, Dominic. Opposition to one of their own sex will
make them warmly embrace opinions you supposed were just those which they
most strongly condemned. She has taken a very high tone, for some time
past, about the Cedar Lodge ladies, has the wife. And when I came in, the
evening of her last at-home day, I found her sadly upset at having heard
from one of them that you were about to leave. She implied that I was to
blame; whereas I can truthfully say my conduct throughout has been largely
influenced by the fear of hurting her feelings." The speaker looked
helplessly at Mr. Iglesias. "Of course we do not expect the same reticence
in speech from females we require of ourselves. Still, such unfounded
accusations are rather galling."

"I cannot be otherwise than very grateful to Mrs. Lovegrove for espousing
my cause, you see," Iglesias replied. This confused and gentle being,
struggling with the complexities of friendship, religious prejudice, and
feminine methods and amenities, was wholly moving. "Circumstances have
arisen which have made me decide to give up my rooms at Cedar Lodge.
To-night is the last upon which I shall occupy them. But I do not wish
Mrs. Lovegrove to be under any misapprehension regarding my hostess and
her companion. I have nothing to complain of. During my long residence
they have treated me with courtesy and consideration. I wish them nothing
but good. Still the time has come, I feel, for leaving Cedar Lodge."

Here the worthy George's imagination indulged in wild flights. Visions of
a hideous and rugged cell--of the sort known exclusively to serial
melodrama--and of a beautiful woman, in voluminous rose-red skirts and a
costly overcoat, presented themselves to him in amazing juxtaposition.

"Of course, I have forfeited all right to question you as to your plans,
Dominic," he said hurriedly and humbly. "I quite realise that. I believed
I was acting on principle in keeping away from you, all the more because
it pained me terribly to do so. I believed I was being consistent. Now I
begin to fear I was only obstinate and cowardly. Your kindness of manner
has completely unmanned me. I see how superior you are in liberality to
myself. And so it cuts me to the quick, more than ever, to part from you."

"Why should we part?" Iglesias asked.

"But you are going away. The wife told me she heard you were
leaving London altogether; whether to--I hardly like to mention the
supposition--to join some brotherhood or--or, to be married, she did not
know."

Mr. Iglesias shook his head, smiling sweetly and bravely.

"Oh! no, no, my dear fellow," he answered. "Rumour must have been rather
unpardonably busy with my name. I fear I am about equally ill-fitted for
monastic and for married life. The day of splendid ventures, whether of
religion or of love, is over for me; and I shall die, as I have lived, a
bachelor and a layman. Nor shall I cease to be your neighbour, for I am
only returning here"--he pointed to the open door, in at which coatless
white-aproned men carried that miscellaneous collection of furniture--"to
the little old Holland Street house. Lately I have had a great craving
upon me to be at home again--alone, save for one or two precious
friendships; with leisure to read and to think; and, in as far as my poor
mental powers permit, to become a humble student of the awe-inspiring
philosophy--reconciling things natural and supernatural--of which the
Catholic Church is the exponent, her creeds its textbook, her ceremonies
and ritual the divinely appointed symbols of its secret truths." Iglesias'
expression was exalted, his speech penetrated by enthusiasm. "It would be
profitable and happy," he said, "before the final auditing of accounts, to
be a little better versed in this wonderful and living wisdom."

And George Lovegrove stood watching him, bewildered, agitated, full of
doubt and inquiry.

"Ah! it is all beyond me, quite beyond me," he exclaimed presently.
"Mistaken or not, I see you are in touch with thoughts altogether outside
my experience and comprehension. I supposed Romanism could only be held by
uneducated and superstitious persons. I see I was wrong. I ask your
pardon, Dominic. I see I quite undervalued it." Then his manner changed,
quick perception and consequent distress seizing him. "Ah! but you are
ill. That is the meaning of it all. You are ill. Now I come to observe
you, I see how thin and drawn your face is. How shall I ever forgive
myself for not finding that out sooner! I have differed from you and
blamed you. I have sulked, and thought bitterly of you, and avoided you.
I have even been envious, hearing how successfully you carried through
affairs this anxious time at the bank. I have been a contemptibly
mean-spirited individual. No, I can never forgive myself. I have found you
again, only to lose you. You are in bad health. You have been suffering,
and I never thought to inquire about that. I never knew it."

But Dominic Iglesias made effort to comfort him, speaking not
uncheerfully, determining even to fight the fatigue and weakness which, as
he could not but own, daily increased on him, if only for the sake of this
faithful and simple adherent.

"Perhaps the sands are running rather low," he said; "but that does not
greatly matter. The conditions are in process of alteration. Now that I am
free of my City work, the strain is practically over. With care and quiet,
the sands that remain in the glass may run very slowly. I have a peaceful
time in prospect, here in my old home. When I left here, eight years ago,
I could not make up my mind to part with any of our family belongings, so
I warehoused all the contents of the house, save those which I took to
furnish my rooms at Cedar Lodge. Now these half-forgotten possessions see
the light once more. This in itself should constitute a staying of the
running sands, a putting back of the hands of the clock. Then I have two
good servants to care for me. I am fortunate in that. And your friendship
is restored to me. I should be ungrateful if I did not live on for a while
to enjoy all this kindly circumstance. So do not grieve. There are many
after-dinner pipes to be smoked, many talks to be talked yet.--Come into
the house, and see it as you used to know it when we both were young.
Surely it is a good omen that you, my earliest friend, should be my first
visitor when I come home?"

CHAPTER XXXV

De Courcy Smyth was not drunk, but he had been drinking--persistently
nipping, as his custom was in times of mental excitement, in the
fallacious hope of keeping up courage and steadying irritable nerves. The
series of moods usually resultant on such recourse to spirituous liquors,
followed one another with clock-work regularity. He was alternately
hysterically elated, preternaturally moral, offensively quarrelsome,
maudlin to the point of tears. The first _matinee_ of his
long-promised play had prospered but very ill, notwithstanding large
advertisement and free list. The second had prospered even worse.
Mercifully disposed persons, slipping out between the acts, had been
careful not to return. Less amiably disposed ones had remained to titter
or hiss. Failure had been written in capital letters across the whole
performance--and deservedly, in the estimation of every one save the
unhappy author himself. The play had perished in the very act of birth.

But of this tragic termination to so many extravagant hopes Dominic
Iglesias was still ignorant, as he entered the dismantled sitting-room at
Cedar Lodge that same night a little after half-past ten o'clock. He had
dined in the old house in Holland Street; served by Frederick, the
German-Swiss valet, who, some weeks previously, hearing of his intended
departure, had announced his intention of "bettering himself," had given
Mrs. Porcher warning, and, in moving terms and three languages, implored
employment of Iglesias, declaring that the other gentlemen resident at
Cedar Lodge were "no class," their clothes utterly unworthy of his powers
of brushing and folding.

Iglesias stayed on in Holland Street until late, the charm and gentleness
of old associations, the sight of familiar objects, the gladness of
restored friendship with George Lovegrove working upon him to
thankfulness. He was tranquil in spirit, serene with the calm twilight
serenity of the strong who have learned the secret of detachment, and,
who, while welcoming all glad and gracious occurrences, have schooled
themselves to resignation, and, in the affairs of this world, do neither
greatly fear nor greatly hope. And it was in this spirit he had made his
way back to Cedar Lodge and entered the square panelled sitting-room. But,
the door closed, he paused, aware of some sinister influence, some unknown
yet repulsive presence. The room was nearly dark, the gas being lowered to
a pin-point on either side the mantelpiece. Dominic moved across to turn
it up, and in so doing stumbled over an unexpected obstacle. De Courcy
Smith, who had been dozing uneasily in the one remaining armchair, sat
upright with an oath.

"What are you at, you swine!" he shouted. Then as the light shone forth he
made an effort to recover himself.

"It's hardly necessary to announce your advent by kicking me, Mr.
Iglesias," he said thickly, and without attempting to rise from his seat.
"Not but that there is an appropriateness in that graceful form of
introduction. Only a kick from the benevolent patron, who professed
himself so charitably disposed towards me, was required to make up the sum
of outrage which has been my portion to-day.--Have you seen the theatrical
items in the evening papers?" With trembling hands he spread out a
newspaper upon his knees. "See the way that dirty reptile, Percy Gerrard,
who succeeded me upon _The Daily Bulletin_, has chopped me and my
play to mincemeat, cut bits of live flesh out of me and fried them in
filth, and washed down my wounds with the vitriol of hypocritical
compassion and good advice? That is the style of recognition a really
first-class work of art, fit to rank with the classics, with Wycherley,
and Congreve, and Sheridan, or Lytton--for there are qualities of all
these very dissimilar masters in my writing--gets from the present-day
press. As I have told you all along, the critics and playwrights hate
me because they fear me. I have never spared them. I have exposed them and
their ignorance, and want of scholarship, in print. They know I spoke the
truth. Their hatred is witness to my veracity. They have been nursing
their venom for years. Now with one consent they pour it forth. It is a
vile plot and conspiracy. They were sworn to swamp me, so they formed a
ring. They did not care what they spent so long as they succeeded in
crushing me. Every one has been bought, miserably, scandalously bought.
This is the only conceivable explanation of the reception my play has met
with. They got at the members of my company. My actors played better at
first, better at rehearsal. Yesterday and to-day they have played like a
row of wooden ninepins, of straw-stuffed scarecrows, of rot-stricken
idiots! They missed their cues, and forgot their lines, or pretended to do
so; and then had the infernal impertinence to giggle and gag, blast them!
I heard them. I could have screamed. I tried to stop them; and the
stage-manager swore at me in the wings, and the scene-shifters laughed. It
was a hideous nightmare. The audience laughed--the sound of it is in my
ears now, and it tortures me, for it was not natural laughter. It was not
spontaneous--how could it be so? It was simply part of this iniquitous
conspiracy to ruin me. It was hired mockery, bought and paid for, the
mockery of subsidised traitors, liars, imbeciles, the inhuman mockery of
grinning apes!"

He crushed the newspaper together with both hands, flung it across the
room, and broke into hysterical weeping.

"For my play is a masterpiece," he wailed. "It is a work of genius. No
other man living could have written it. Yet it is damned by a brainless
public and vindictive press, while I know and they know--they must know,
the fact is self-evident--that it is great, nothing less than great."

During this harangue Dominic Iglesias stood immovable, facing the speaker,
but looking down, not at him, rigid in attitude, silent. Any attempt to
stem the torrent of the wretched man's speech would have been futile.
Dominic judged it kindest just to wait, letting passion tear him till, by
force of its own violence, it had worn itself out. Then, but not till
them, it might be helpful to intervene. Still the exhibition was a very
painful one, putting a heavy strain upon the spectator. For be a fellow
creature never so displeasing in nature and in habit, never so cankered by
vanity and self-love, it cannot be otherwise than hideous to see him upon
the rack. And that de Courcy Smyth was very actually upon the rack--a rack
well deserved, may be, and of his own constructing, but which wrenched his
every joint to the agony of dislocation nevertheless--there could be no
manner of doubt. Coming as conclusion to the long day, to the peaceful
evening--the thought of the Lady of the Windswept Dust, moreover, and her
fortunes so eminently and presently just now in the balance, in his
mind--the whole situation was horrible to Dominic Iglesias.

But Smyth's mood changed, his tears ceasing as incontinently as they had
begun. He ceased to slouch and writhe, passed his hands across his
blood-shot eyes, drew himself up in his chair, began to snarl, even to
swagger.

"I forget myself, and forget you, too, Mr. Iglesias--which is annoying,"
he said; "for you are about the last person from whom I could expect, or
should desire to receive, sympathy. Persons of my world, scholars and
idealists, and persons of your world, money-grubbing materialists, can, in
the nature of things, have very little in common. There is a great gulf
fixed between them. I beg your pardon for having so far forgotten myself
as to ignore that fact, and talked on subjects incomprehensible to you.
What follows, however, will be more in your line, I imagine, and it is
this which has made me come here to-night. You realise that your
investment has turned out an unfortunate one? You have lost, irretrievably
lost, your money."

"I was not wholly unprepared for that," Dominic answered. His temper was
beginning to rise. Sodden with drink, maddened by failure, hardly
accountable for his words or actions, still the man's tone was rather too
offensive for endurance. "I had made full provision for such a
contingency. I accept the loss. Pray do not let it trouble you."

"Oh! you accept it, do you? You were prepared for it?" Smyth broke in.
"You can afford to throw way a cool three hundred pounds--the expenses
will amount to that at least in the bulk. How very agreeable for you!
Your late operations in the City must have been surprisingly profitable.
I was not aware, until now, that we had the honour of numbering a
millionaire among us at Cedar Lodge. But let me tell you this extremely
superior tone does not please me, Mr. Iglesias. It smells of insult. I
warn you, you had better be a little careful. Even a miserable persecuted
pauper like myself can make it unpleasant for those who insult him. I must
request you to remember that I am a gentleman by birth, and that I have
the feelings of my class where my personal honour is concerned. Do you
suppose I do not know perfectly well that the benevolent attitude you have
seen fit to assume towards me has been a blind, from first to last; and
that every penny you have advanced me until now, as well as the three
hundred pounds, the loss of which you so amiably beg me not to let trouble
me, is hush-money? Yes, hush-money, I repeat, the price of my silence
regarding your intrigue with my wife--my wife who calls herself--"

"We will introduce no woman's name into this conversation, if you please,"
Iglesias interrupted sternly.

The limit of things pardonable had been passed. His face was white and
keen as a sword. The weight of years and of failing health had vanished,
burned up by fierce disgust and anger, as is mist by the sun-heat. He was
young, arrogant in bearing, careless of consequence or of danger as some
fifteenth-century finely bred fighting man face to face with his enemy and
traducer, who, given honourable opportunity, he would kill or be killed
by, without faintest scruple or remorse. And of this temper of mind his
aspect was so eloquent that de Courcy Smyth, muddled with liquor though he
was, seeing him, was seized with panic. He scrambled to his feet, flung
himself behind the chair, clinging to the back of it for support.

"Don't look at me like that, you Spanish devil!" he whimpered. "You
paralyse me. You hypnotise me. My brain is splitting. You're drawing the
life out of me. I shall go mad. If you come a step nearer I'll make a
scandal. I'll call for help. Ah! God in heaven, who's that?"

Only the housemaid entering, salver in hand, and leaving the door wide
open behind her. Upon the landing with out, Farge and Worthington, in
comic attitudes, stood at attention.

"A telegram for you, sir. Is the boy to wait?" she inquired, in a stifled
voice. "She could hardly keep a straight face," as she reported downstairs
subsequently, "that ridiculous Farge was so full of his jokes."

Iglesias tore open the yellow envelope and held the telegraph-form to the
light.

"Glorious luck. Happy as a queen. Come to supper after performance
to-morrow. Love. Poppy,"

His face softened.

"No answer," he said, and turned purposing to speak some word of mercy to
wretched de Courcy Smyth. But the latter had slunk out at the open door,
while Mr. Farge, in an ungovernable paroxysm of humour--levelled at the
departing housemaid--effectually covered his retreat by cake-walking, with
very high knee action, the length of the landing, playing appropriate
dance-music, the while, upon an imaginary banjo in the shape of
Worthington's new crook-handled walking stick.

For some time Dominic Iglesias heard shuffling, nerveless footsteps moving
to and fro in the room overhead. Then Smyth threw himself heavily upon his
bed. The wire-wove mattress creaked, and creaked again twice. Unbroken
silence followed, and Iglesias breathed more easily, hoping the miserable
being slept. For him, Iglesias, there was no sleep. His body was too
tired. His mind too vividly and painfully awake. He lay down, it is true,
since he did not care to remain in the dismantled sitting-room or occupy
the chair in which de Courcy Smyth had sat. But, throughout the night, he
stared at the darkness and heard the hours strike. At sunset the wind
had dropped dead. In the small hours it began to rise, and before dawn to
freshen, veering to another quarter. Softly at first, and then with richer
diapason, the cedar tree greeted its mysterious comrade, singing of
far-distant times and places, and of the permanence of nature as against
the fitful evanescent life of man. That husky singing soothed Dominic
Iglesias, and calmed him, assuring him that in the hands of the Almighty
are all things, small and great, past, present, and to come. There is
neither haste, nor omission, nor accident, nor oversight in the divine
plan; but that plan is large beyond the possibility of human intellect to
grasp or comprehend, therefore humble faith is also highest wisdom.

As the dawn quickened into day Dominic drew aside the curtain and looked
out. Behind the dark branches, where they cleared the housetops and met
the open sky, thrown wide upward to the zenith, was the rose-scarlet of
sunrise, holding, as it seemed to him, at once the splendour of battle
and the peace of crowned achievement and--was it but a pretty conceit or a
truth of happiest import?--the colour of certain flaring omnibus
knifeboard bills and the colour of a certain woman's name.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The narrow lane, running back at right angles to the great thoroughfare,
was filled with blurred yellowish light and covered in with gloom,
low-hanging and impenetrable. The high, blank buildings on either side of
it looked like the perpendicular walls of a tunnel, the black roof they
apparently supported being as solid and substantial as themselves. The
effect thereby produced was suspect and prison-like, as of a space walled
in and closed from open air and day. Outside the stage entrance of the
Twentieth Century Theatre a small crowd had collected and formed up in two
parallel lines across the pavement to the curb, against which a smart
single brougham and some half a dozen four-wheelers and hansoms were
drawn up. The crowd, which gathered and broke only to gather again, was
composed for the main part of persons of the better artisan class,
respectable, soberly habited, evidently awaiting the advent of relations
employed within the theatre. There was also a sprinkling of showy young
women, attended by undersized youths flashily dressed. On the fringes of
it night-birds, male and female, of evil aspect, loitered, watchful of
possible prey; while two or three gentlemen, correct, highly-civilised,
stood smoking, each with the air of studied indifference which defies
attempted recognition on the part of friend or foe.

And among these last Dominic Iglesias must be counted; though, in his
case, indifference was not assumed but real. His surroundings were novel,
it is true, and produced on him clear impressions both pictorial and
moral; but those impressions were of his surroundings in and for
themselves, rather than in any doubtfulness of their relation to himself.
For his mind was occupied with problems painful in character and difficult
of solution; and to the said problems, heightening the emotional strain of
them, his surroundings--the sense of feverish life, of all-encompassing
restless humanity; the figures anxious, degraded, of questionable purpose
or merely frivolous, which started into momentary distinctness; the scraps
of conversation, caught in passing, instinct with suggestion, squalid or
passionate; along with the ceaseless tramp of footsteps, and tumult of the
great thoroughfare just now packed with the turn-out of neighbouring
places of entertainment--supplied a background penetratingly appropriate.

For a good half-hour Mr. Iglesias stood there. At intervals the doors of
the stage entrance swung open, causing a movement of interest and comment
among the crowd. One by one hansoms and four-wheelers, obtaining fares,
rattled away over the stones. Yet the Lady of the Windswept Dust tarried.
It grew late, and Iglesias greatly desired her coming, greatly desired to
speak with her, and speaking to find approximate solution, at least, of
some of the problems which lay so heavy upon his mind. Meanwhile, the
crowd melted and vanished, leaving him alone in the blurred yellowish
light beneath the low-hanging roof of impenetrable gloom, save for the
haunting presence of some few of those terrible human birds of prey.

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