"Yes, yes, indeed, good Renny, what would become of me? – what would have become of me? – how long ago it seems! – without you? And yet it might have been as well if two skeletons, closely locked in embrace, blanched by the grinding of the waters and the greed of the crabs, now reposed somewhere deep in the sands of that Vilaine estuary… This score of years, she has had rest from the nightmare that men have made of life on God's beautiful earth. I have been through more of it, my good Renny."
René's brain was never equal to coping with his master's periodic fits of pessimism, though he well knew their first and ever-present cause. In a troubled way he looked about the room, so peaceful, so retired and studious; and Sir Adrian understood.
"Yes, yes, you are right; I have cut off the old life," he made answer to the unspoken expostulation, "and that I can live in my own small world without foregoing all my duties, I owe to you, my good friend; but startling news like this brings back the past very livingly, dead though it be – dead."
René hesitated; he was pondering over the advisability of disburdening himself of yet another strange item of information he had in reserve; but, as his master, rousing himself with an effort as if to dismiss some haunting thought, turned round again to the table, he decided that the moment was not propitious.
"So you have seen to all these things," said Sir Adrian wearily. "Good; I will look over them."
He touched the neat pile of books and papers, listlessly, as he spoke, yet, instead of sitting down, remained as he was, with eyes that had grown wondering, staring out across the sea.
"Look," he said presently, in a low voice, and René noticed a rare flush of colour rise to the thin cheeks. "Look – is not this day just like – one we both remember well…? Listen, the wind is coming up as it did then. And look at yonder sky!"
And taking the man by the arm, he advanced slowly with him towards the window.
In the west the heavens on the horizon had grown threateningly dark; but under the awe-inspiring slate-coloured canopy of clouds there opened a broad archway filled with primrose light – the luminous arch, well known to seafarers, through which charge the furious southwestern squalls. The rushing of the storm was already visible in the distance over the grey waters, which having been swayed for days by a steady Aquilon were now lashed in flank by the sudden change of wind.
The two men looked out for a while in silence at the spectacle of the coming storm. In the servant's mind ran various trivial thoughts bearing on the present – what a lucky matter it was that he should have returned in time; only just in time it was; from the angry look of the outer world the island would now, for many a day be besieged by seas impassable to such small craft as alone could reach the reef. Had he tarried but to the next tide (and how sorely he had been tempted to remain an hour more in the gatekeeper's lodge within sight and hearing of buxom Moggie, Margery's grand-daughter), had he missed the tide, for days, maybe for weeks, would the master have had to watch and tend, alone, the beacon fire. But here he was, and all was well; and he had still the marvellous news to tell. Should he tell them now? No, the master was in one of his trances – lost far away in the past no doubt, that past that terminated on such a day as this. And Sir Adrian, with eyes fixed on the widening arch of yellow light, was looking inwards on the far-away distance of time.
Men, who have been snatched back to life from death in the deep, recall how, before seeming to yield the ghost, the picture of their whole existence passed in vivid light before the eye of their mind. Swift beyond the power of understanding are such revelations; in one flash the events of a good or an evil life leap before the seeing soul – moment of anguish intolerable or of sublime peace!
On such a boisterous day as this, some nineteen years before, by the sandy mouth of the river Vilaine, on the confines of Brittany and Vendée had Adrian Landale been drowned; under such a sky, and under the buffets of such an angry wind had he been recalled to life, and in the interval, he had seen the same pictures which now, coursing back many years in a few seconds, passed before his inward vision.
CHAPTER III
DAY DREAMS: A PHILOSOPHER'S FATE
Le beau temps de ma jeunesse … quand j'étais si malheureux.
The borderland between adolescence and manhood, in the life of men of refined aspirations and enthusiastic mettle, is oftener than not an unconsciously miserable period – one which more mature years recall as hollow, deceiving, bitterly unprofitable.
Yet there is always that about the memories of those far-off young days, their lofty dreams long since scattered, their virgin delights long since lost in the drudgery of earthly experience, which ever and anon seizes the heart unawares and fills it with that infinite weakness: that mourning for the dead and gone past, which yet is not regret.
In the high days of the Revolutionary movement across the water, Adrian Landale was a dreamy student living in one of those venerable Colleges on the Cam, the very atmosphere of which would seem sufficient to glorify the merits of past ages and past institutions.
Amidst such peaceful surroundings this eldest scion of an ancient, north-country race – which had produced many a hardy fighter, though never yet a thinker nor even a scholar – amid a society as prejudiced and narrow-minded as all privileged communities are bound to become, had nevertheless drifted resistlessly towards that unfathomable sea whither a love for the abstract beautiful, a yearning for super-earthly harmony and justice, must inevitably waft a young intelligence.
As the academical years glided over him, he accumulated much classical lore, withal read much latter-day philosophy and developed a fine youthful, theoretical love for the new humanitarianism. He dipped æsthetically into science, wherein he found a dim kind of help towards a more recondite appreciation of the beauties of nature. His was not a mind to delight in profound knowledge, but rather in "intellectual cream."
He solaced himself with essays that would have been voted brilliant had they dealt with things less extravagant than Universal Harmony and Fraternal Happiness; with verses that all admitted to be highly polished and melodious, but something too mystical in meaning for the understanding of an every-day world; with music, whereof he was conceded an interpreter of no mean order.
In fact the worship of his soul might have been said to be the Beautiful in the abstract – the Beautiful in all its manifestations which include Justice, Harmony, Truth, and Kindliness – the one indispensable element of his physical happiness, the Beautiful in the concrete.
This is saying that Adrian Landale, for all his array of definite accomplishments, which might have been a never-failing source of interest in an easy existence, was fitted in a singularly unfortunate manner for the life into which one sudden turn of fortune's wheel unexpectedly launched him.
During the short halcyon days of his opening independence, however, he was able to make himself the centre of such a world as he would have loved to live in. He was not, of course, generally popular, either at college or at home; nor yet in town, except among that small set in whose midst he inevitably found his way wherever he went; his inferiors in social status perhaps, these chosen friends of his; but their lofty enthusiasms were both appreciative of and congenial to his own. Most of them, indeed, came in after-life to add their names to England's roll of intellectual fame, partly because they had that in them which Adrian loathed as unlovely – the instinct and will of strife, partly; it must be added, because they remained free in their circumstances to follow the lead of their nature. Which freedom was not allotted to him.
On one magnificent frosty afternoon, early in the year 1794, the London coach deposited Adrian Landale in front of the best hostelry in Lancaster, after more than a year's separation from his family.
This separation was not due to estrangement, but rather to the instigation of his own sire, Sir Thomas – a gentleman of the "fine old school" – who, exasperated by the, to him, incomprehensible and insupportable turn of mind developed by his heir (whom he loved well enough, notwithstanding, in his own way), had hoped, in good utilitarian fashion, that a prolonged period of contact with the world, lubricated by a plentiful supply of money, might shake his "big sawney of a son" out of his sickly-sentimental views; that it would show him