The Far Horizon Part 1

The Far Horizon.

by Lucas Malet.

"Ask for the Old Paths, where is the Good Way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest."--JEREMIAS.

"The good man is the bad man's teacher; the bad man is the material upon which the good man works. If the one does not value his teacher, if the other does not love his material, then despite their sagacity they must go far astray. This is a mystery of great import."--FROM THE SAYINGS OF LAO-TZU.

..."Cherchons a voir les choses comme elles sont, et ne voulons pas avoir plus d'esprit que le bon Dieu! Autrefois on croyait que la canne a sucre seule donnait le sucre, on en tire a peu pres de tout maintenant. Il est de meme de la poesie. Extrayons-la de n'importe quoi, car elle git en tout et partout. Pas un atome de matiere qui ne contienne pas la poesie.

Et habituons-nous a considerer le monde comme un oeuvre d'art, dont il faut reproduire les procedees dans nos oeuvres."--GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

CHAPTER I

Dominic Iglesias stood watching while the lingering June twilight darkened into night. He was tired in body, but his mind was eminently, consciously awake, to the point of restlessness, and this was unusual with him. He had raised the lower sash of each of the three tall, narrow windows to its extreme height, since the first-floor sitting-room, though of fair proportions, appeared close. His thought refused the limits of it, and ranged outward over the expanse of Trimmer's Green, the roadway and houses bordering it, to the far northwest, that region of hurried storm, of fierce, equinoctial pa.s.sion and conflict, now paved with plaques of flat, dingy, violet cloud opening on smoky rose-red wastes of London sunset. All day thunder had threatened, but had not broken. And, even yet, the face of heaven seemed less peaceful than remonstrant, a sullenness holding it as of troops in retreat denied satisfaction of imminent battle.

Otherwise the outlook was wholly pacific, one of middle-cla.s.s suburban security. The Green aforesaid is bottle-shaped, the neck of it debouching into a crowded westward-wending thoroughfare; while Cedar Lodge, from the first-floor windows of which Mr. Iglesias contemplated the oncoming of night, being situate in the left shoulder, so to speak, of the bottle, commanded, diagonally, an uninterrupted view of the whole extent of it.

Who Trimmer was, how he came by a Green, and why, or what he trimmed on it, it is idle at this time of day to attempt to determine. Whether, animated by a desire for the public welfare, he bequeathed it in high charitable sort; or whether, fame taking a less enviable turn with him, he just simply was hanged there, has afforded matter of heated controversy to the curious in questions of suburban nomenclature and topography. But in this case, as in so many other and more august ones, the origins defy discovery. Suffice it, therefore, that the name remains, as does the open s.p.a.ce--the latter forming one of those minor "lungs of London" which offer such amiable oases in the great city's less aristocratic residential districts. Formerly the Green boasted a row of fine elms, and was looked on by discreetly handsome eighteenth-century mansions and villas, set in s.p.a.cious gardens. But of these, the great majority--Cedar Lodge being a happy exception--has vanished under the hand of the early Victorian speculative builder; who, in their stead, has erected full complement of the architectural plat.i.tudes common to his age and taste. Dignity has very sensibly given place to gentility.

Nevertheless the timid red, or sickly yellow-grey, brick of the existing houses is pleasingly veiled by ivy and Virginia creeper, while no shop front obtrudes derogatory suggestion of retail trade. The local authorities, moreover, some ten years back girdled the Green with healthy young balsam-poplar and plane trees and enclosed the gra.s.s with iron hurdles--to rescue it from trampling into unsightly pathways--thus doing a well-intentioned, if somewhat unimaginative, best to safeguard the theatre of long ago Trimmer's beneficence or infamy from greater spoliation.

Hence it follows that, certain inherent limitations admitted, the scene upon which Dominic Iglesias' eyes rested was not without elements of attraction. And of this fact, being a person of an excellent temperance of expectation, he was gratefully aware. His surroundings, indeed, const.i.tuted, so it appeared to him, the maximum of comfort and advantage which could be expected by a middle-aged gentleman, of moderate fortune, in the capacity of a "paying guest." Not only in word but in thought--for in acknowledgment of obligation he was scrupulously courteous. He frequently tendered thanks to his neighbour and old school-fellow, Mr.

George Lovegrove, first for calling his attention to Mrs. Porcher's advertis.e.m.e.nt, and subsequently for rea.s.suring him as to its import. For, though incapable of forming so much as a thought to her concrete disparagement, Mr. Iglesias was not without a quiet sense of humour, or of that instinct of self-protection common to even the most chivalrous of mankind. He was, therefore, perfectly sensible that "the widow of a military officer," who describes herself in print as "bright, musical and thoroughly domesticated," while offering "a cheerful and refined home at the West End, within three minutes of Tube and omnibus"--"n.o.ble dining and recreation rooms, bath h. and c." thrown in--to unmarried members of the stronger s.e.x, must of necessity be a lady whose close acquaintance it would be foolhardy to make without a trifle of preliminary scouting.

Happily not only George Lovegrove, but his estimable wife was at hand.

The latter hastened to prosecute inquiries, beginning with a visit to the Anglican vicar of the parish, the Rev. Giles Nevington. He reported Mrs.

Porcher an evening communicant at the greater festivals, and a not ungenerous donor to parochial charities; adding that a former curate had resided under her roof with perfect impunity. Mrs. Lovegrove terminated her researches by an interview with the fishmonger, who a.s.sured her that "Cedar Lodge always took the best cuts," sternly refused fish or poultry which had suffered cold storage, and paid its housebooks without fail before noon on Thursday. She ascertained, further, from a source socially intermediate between clergyman and tradesman, that Mrs. Porcher's husband, some time veterinary surgeon of a crack regiment, had died in the odour of alcohol rather than in that of sanct.i.ty, leaving his widow--in addition to his numerous and heavy debts--but a fraction of the comfortable fortune to procure the enjoyment of which he had so considerately married her. The solid Georgian mansion was her freehold; and it was to secure sufficient means for continued residence in it that the poor lady started a boarding-house, or in the politer language of the present day, had decided to receive paying guests.

Encouraged by the satisfactory nature of the above information, Mr.

Iglesias--shortly after his mother's death, now nearly eight years ago-- had become a member of Mrs. Porcher's household. He had never, so far, had reason to regret that step. And it was with a consciousness of well-being and repose that he returned daily--after hours of strenuous work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking--to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in chimney- piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often goes along with these const.i.tutes the burden and the offence.

To-night, however, things were different. Material objects remained the same; but the conditions of existence had taken on a strange appearance, and with that appearance Iglesias was bound to reckon, being uncertain as yet whether it was destined to prove that of a friend or of an enemy. In furtherance of such reckoning, he had declined dining at the public table, in company with his hostess, Miss Eliza Hart, her devoted friend and companion, and the three gentlemen--Mr. de Courcy Smyth, Mr. Farge, and Mr. Worthington--who shared with him the hospitalities of Cedar Lodge. He had dined here, upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the German- Swiss valet, had just finished clearing the table and departed. Usually under such circ.u.mstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite book from the carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small library; and, reading again that which he had often read before, would have found therein the satisfaction of friends.h.i.+p, along with the soothing influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's _Rome_--a handsome early edition in many volumes--_The Travels of Anacharsis_, Evelyn's _Diary_, Napier's _Peninsular War_, John Stuart Mill's _Logic_, Byron's _Poems_, nor those of Calderon, nor of that so-called "prodigy of nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and immortal _Don Quixote_ himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts, his own life, filled his whole horizon, leaving no s.p.a.ce for the thoughts or lives of others.

He found himself a prey to a certain mental incoherence, a bewildering activity of vision. More than once before in the course of his laborious, monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous life had this same thing happened to him--the tides of the obvious and accustomed suddenly receding and leaving him stranded, as on some barren sand-bank, uncertain whether the s.h.i.+p of his individual fate would lie there wind-swept and sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out and planks parted, disclosing the ribs of her in unsightly nakedness, or whether the kindly tide, rising, would float her off into blue water and she would sail hopefully once again.

It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these other happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the s.h.i.+p of his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left school.

Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in Holland Street, Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the world and to obtain, it had dawned on him that there was something strange, unhappy, and not as it was wont to be with that, to him, most beautiful and beloved of women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy against which his young loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the inherent pieties of his Latin and Celtic blood, had none of that contemptuous superiority in regard of his near relations so common to male creatures of the Protestant persuasion and Anglo-Saxon race. He took his parents quite seriously; it never having occurred to him that fathers and mothers are given us merely for purposes of discipline, or as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He was simple-minded enough indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism--and this, as destiny would have it, with intimate and life-long results.

Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the fierce and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother lived-- namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the house in the Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking stairways, its high wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and scampered--its clinging odour of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings, and uneven floors. At the back of it was a narrow strip of garden, glorious for one brief week in early summer, with the gold of a big laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to faithful effort on the part of the white jasmine clothing its enclosing walls. In fair weather the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a stone basin--in which, after rain, sparrows disported themselves with much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings--the garden was, to little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his pa.s.sing humour.

Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.

His father, grave and preoccupied, whose arrivals after long periods of absence had in them an effect of secrecy and haste, was to the small boy a being, august, but remote. During his brief sojourns at home the quiet house awoke to greater fulness of life, with much coming and going of other grave personages, strange of dress, and with a certain effect of hardly restrained violence in their aspect. A spirit of fear seemed to enter with them, demanding an unnatural darkening of windows and closing of doors. Before Dominic they were of few words; but became eloquent enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears testified when he was banished from their rather electric presence to the solitude of the nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of mystery, of large issues, of things at once strong and hidden, impenetrable to his understanding and concerning which no questions might be asked, encircled Dominic's childhood and pa.s.sed into the very fabric of his thought. While through it all his mother moved, to him tender and wholly exquisite, but with the reticence of some deep-seated enthusiasm silently cherished, some far-reaching alarm silently endured, always upon her. And this resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and responsibility which inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober beyond his years, tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and pitching even his laughter in a minor key.

Only many years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ign.o.ble nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved in revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type--a victim of that false pa.s.sion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest desire for the welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against all forms of authority. His self-confidence was colossal; all rule being abominable to him--save his own--all rulers hideous, save himself. The anarchist, rightly understood, is merely the autocrat, the tyrant, turned inside out. And this man, as Dominic gathered from the perusal of those old letters, to whom the end so justified the means that red-handed crime took on the fair colours of virtue, his mother had loved, even while she feared him, with all the faithfulness and pure pa.s.sion of her Irish blood. Pathetic combination, the patience and resignation of the one ever striving to temper the flaming zeal of the other, as though the spindrift of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the dim sadness of far western coasts, should strive with relentless fierceness of sunglare outpoured on some high-lying walled city of arid central Spain! Mist is but a weak thing as against rock and fire; and what his mother must have suffered in moral and spiritual conflict, let alone all question of active dread, was to her son almost too cruel to contemplate, although it explained and justified much.

In 1860, when Dominic was a schoolboy of fourteen, his father left home on one of those sudden journeys the object and objective of which were alike concealed. For about a year letters arrived at irregular intervals, hailing from Paris, Naples, Prague, and finally Petersburg. Then followed silence, broken only by rumours furtively conveyed by a former a.s.sociate, one Pascal Pelletier--an angel-faced, long-haired, hysteric creature, inspired by an impa.s.sioned enthusiasm for infernal machines and wholesale slaughter in theory, and, in practice, by a gentle doglike devotion to Mrs. Iglesias and young Dominic. He would arrive depressed and shadowy in the shadowy twilights. But, once in the presence of the beings whom he loved, he became effervescent. His belief was unlimited in the Head Centre, the Chief, in his demonic power and fertility of resource. That any evil should befall him!--Pascal snapped his thin fingers; while, with the inalienable optimism of the born fanatic, he proceeded to state hopeful conjecture as established fact, thereby doing homage to the spirit of delusion which so conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost thought. But a spell of cold weather in the winter of 1862 struck a little too shrewdly through Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender- hearted subverter of society to cough his life out, with all possible despatch, in the third-floor back of a filthy lodging-house off Tottenham Court Road.

This was the end as far as information went, whether authentic or apocryphal. But Dominic, his horizon still bounded by the world of school, greedy of distinction both in learning and in games, away all day and eagerly, if somewhat sleepily, busy over the preparation of lessons at night, was very far from realising that. Poor voluble kind-eyed Pascal he mourned with all his heart; yet the months of his father's absence acc.u.mulated into years almost unnoticed. The same thing had so often happened before; and then, at an unlooked-for moment, the wanderer had returned. Moreover, the old habit of obedience was still strong in him.

It was understood that concerning his father's occupations and movements no comment might be made, no questions might be asked.

Meanwhile, the small house in Holland Street was ever more still, more unfrequented. As he grew older Dominic became increasingly sensible of this--sensible of a sort of hush falling on him as he crossed the threshold, so that instinctively he left much of his wholesome young animality outside, while his voice took on softer tones in speech, and his quick light footsteps became more scrupulously noiseless as he ran up the little crooked stairs.

"When your father comes home we must decide what profession you shall follow, my Dominic," it had been his mother's habit to declare. But, even before the time for such decision arrived the boy had begun to understand he must see to all that unaided. For his mother was ill, how deeply and in what manner he could not tell. He shrank, indeed, from all clear thought, let alone speech, on the subject, as from something indelicate, in a way irreverent. Her beauty remained to her, notwithstanding a gradual wasting as of fever. A peculiar, very individual grace of dress and of bearing remained to her likewise. But she was uncertain in mood, the victim of strange fancies, a being almost alarmingly far removed from the interests of ordinary life. Long ago, in submission to her husband's anti-clerical prejudices, she had ceased to practise her religion, so that the services of the Church no longer called her forth in beneficent routine of sacred obligation. Now she never left the house, living, since poor Pascal Pelletier's death, in complete seclusion. Little wonder then that a hush fell on Dominic crossing the threshold, since so doing he pa.s.sed from the world of healthy action to that of acquiescent sickness, from vigorous hoa.r.s.e-voiced realities to the intangible sadness of unrelated dreams! The effect was one of rather haunting melancholy; and it was characteristic of the lad that he did not resent it, though rejoicing in the reputation at school of being high-spirited enough, impatient of restraint or of any frustration of purpose. His mother had always been sacred. She remained so, even though her sympathies had become imperfect, and she moved in regions which his sane young imagination failed to penetrate. One thing was perfectly plain to him, though it cut at the root of ambition--namely, that he could not leave her. So, in that matter of a profession, he must find work which would permit of his continuing to live at home; and, since her income was narrow, the work in question must make no heavy demand in respect of preliminary expense.

Here was a problem more easy of statement than of solution, in face of Dominic's pride, inexperience, and the singular isolation of his position! There followed dreary months wherein his evenings were spent in studying and answerings advertis.e.m.e.nts; and his days, till late afternoon, in walking the town from end to end for the interviewing of possible employers and the keeping of fruitless appointments. He would set forth full of hope and courage in the morning, only to return full of the dejection of failure at night. And it was then London began to reveal herself to him in her solidarity, under the cloud of dun-blue coal smoke --it was wintertime--which, at once hanging over and penetrating her immensity, adds the majesty of mystery to the majesty of mere size. He noted how, in the chill twilights, London grew strangely and feverishly alive. Lamps sprang into clearness along the pavements. A dazzling glitter of shop windows marked the great thoroughfares, while often the angry glare of a fire pulsed along the sky-line. When night comes in the country, so Dominic told himself, the land sinks into peaceful repose.

But in cities it is otherwise. There the light leaves heaven for earth; and walks the streets, with much else far from celestial, until the small hours move towards the dawn and usher in the decencies of day.

Never before had he seen London thus and understood it in all its enormous variety, yet as a unit, a whole. How much he actually beheld with his bodily eyes, how much through the working of a rather exalted condition of imagination induced by loneliness and bodily fatigue, he could never subsequently determine. But the great city presented herself to him in the guise of some prodigious living creature, breathing, feeding, suffering, triumphing, above all mating and breeding, terrible in her power and vitality, age old, yet still unspent. Presented herself to him as horribly prolific, ever outpa.s.sing her own unwieldy limits, sending forth her children, year after year, all the wide world over by s.h.i.+pping or by rail; receiving some t.i.the of them back, proud with accomplished fortune to enhance her glory, or, disgraced and broken, slinking homeward to the cover of her fog and darkness merely to swell the numbers of the nameless who rot and die. He thought of those others, too--and this touched his young ardour with a quick shudder of personal fear--whom she never sends forth at all; but holds close in bondage all their lives long, enslaved to her countless and tyrant activities by their own poverty, or by their fellow-creatures' misfortune, cruelties, and sins. Was it thus she was going to deal with him, Dominic Iglesias?

Was he to be among the great city's bondmen through the coming years, better acquainted with the very earthly light which walks her streets by night, than with the heavenly light which gladdens the sweet face of day in the open country and upon the open sea? And for a moment the boy's heart rebelled, hungry for pleasure, hungry for wide experience, hungry even for knowledge of those revolutionary intrigues which, as he was beginning to understand, had surrounded his childhood, and, as he was beginning to fear, had cost his mother her reason and his father both liberty and life. Thus did the s.h.i.+p of poor Dominic's fate appear to be stranded or ever it had fairly set sail at all.

Meanwhile, if London claimed him, she did so in very cynical fas.h.i.+on, mocking his willingness to labour, refusing to feed him even while she refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him--his youth, his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech--all these marked him as unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer of labour--of whatever sort--has, it must be conceded, but little use. He is half afraid, half contemptuous of it, instinctively disliking anything more alert and alive than his own most stolid self. But while men, distrusting the distinctness of his personality and his good looks, refused to give Dominic work, women, relis.h.i.+ng them, were only too ready to give him enjoyment--of a kind. The boy, in those solitary wanderings, ran the gauntlet of many temptations; and was presented--did he care to accept it--with the freedom of the city on very liberal lines. Happily, inherent cleanliness of nature saved him from much; and reverent shame at the thought of entering the hushed and silent house where his mother lived-- spotless, amid pathetic memories and delicate dreams--with the soil of licence upon him, saved him from more. Crime might have come close to him in his childhood, but vice never; and the influences of vice are far more insidious, and consequently more damaging, than those of crime.

Still, one way and another, the boy came very near touching the confines of despair. Then the tide rose and the stranded s.h.i.+p of his fate began to lift a little. By means of a series of accidents--the illness of his former school-fellow, the already mentioned George Lovegrove, whose post he offered temporarily to fill--he drifted into connection with the banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking. There his knowledge of modern languages, his industry, and a certain discreet aloofness commended him to his superiors. A minor clerks.h.i.+p fell vacant; it was offered to him. And from thenceforth, for Dominic Iglesias, the monotony of fixed routine and steady labour, until the day when, as a man of past fifty, restless and somewhat distrustful both of the present and the future, he watched the dying of the sullen sunset over Trimmer's Green from the windows of the first-floor sitting-room of Cedar Lodge.

CHAPTER II

That which had in point of fact happened was not, as Iglesias felt, without a pretty sharp edge of irony. For to-day, London, so long his task-mistress and gaoler, had a.s.sumed a new att.i.tude towards him.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, she had cast him off, given him his freedom. It was amazing, a thing to take your breath away for the moment. And agitated and hurt--for his pride unquestionably had suffered in the process--Iglesias asked himself what in the world he should do with this gift of freedom, what he should do, indeed, with that which remained to him of life?

It had come about thus. Seeking an interview that morning with Sir Abel Barking, in the latter's private room at the bank, he had made certain statements regarding his own health in justification of a request for some weeks' rest and holiday now, rather than later, in September, when his yearly vacation would fall due.

"So you find yourself unequal to dealing satisfactorily with the increasing intricacy of our financial operations, become confused by the multiplicity of detail, suffer from pains in the head?" Sir Abel had commented, with a certain largeness of manner. "I own, my good friend, I was not wholly unprepared for this announcement."

"My work has not so far, I believe, suffered in any respect," Iglesias put in quietly. "Directly I had reason to fear it might suffer I----"

"Of course, of course. I make no complaint--none. I go further. I admit that the area of our undertakings is enlarged, enormously enlarged, thanks to the remarkable personal energy and strenuous transatlantic business methods introduced by my nephew Reginald. I grant you all that----"

Sir Abel cleared his throat. Seduced by the charms of his own eloquence, he was ready to mount the platform at the shortest possible notice, even in private life. He loved exposition. He loved periods. His critics--for what public man is without these, their strictures naturally inspired by envy?--had been known to add that he also loved plat.i.tudes. Be this as it may, certain it is that he loved an audience--even of one. He had been considerably ruffled this morning by communications made to him by his good-looking and somewhat scapegrace youngest son. Those who fail to rule their own households often find solace in attempting to rule the households of others. Speech and patronage consequently tended to the restoration of self-complacency.

"No doubt this expansion, these modern methods, const.i.tute a tax upon your capacity, my good friend, you having acquired your training under a less exacting system. I am not surprised. I confess"--he leaned back in his chair, with an indulgent smile, as one who should say, "the G.o.ds themselves do not wholly escape"--"I confess," he repeated, "it is something of a tax upon the capacity of a veteran financier such as myself. But then strain in some form or other, as I frequently remind myself, is the very master-note of our modern existence. We all experience it in our degree. And there are those men, such as myself, for instance, who from their position, their vast interests and heavy responsibilities, from the almost incalculable issues dependent on their judgment and their action, are called upon to endure this strain in its most exhausting manifestations, who are compelled to subordinate personal case, even health itself, to public obligation. In the end they pay, incontestable they pay, for their self-abnegation, for their unswerving obedience to the trumpet-call of public duty."

He paused and mused a while, his head raised, his right hand resting--it was noticeably podgy and squat--on the highly polished surface of the extensive writing-table, his left hand dropped, with a rather awkward negligence, over the arm of his chair. Meanwhile he gazed, as pensively as his caste of countenance permitted, at a portrait of himself, in the self-same att.i.tude, which adorned the opposite wall. It had been presented to him by the electors of his late const.i.tuency. It was life- size and full-length. It had been painted by a well-known artist whose appreciation of the outward as a revelation of the inward man is slightly diabolic in its completeness. The portrait was very clever; it was also very like. Looking upon it no sane observer could stand in doubt of Sir Abel's eminent respectability or eminent wealth. His appearance exuded both. Unluckily nature had been n.i.g.g.ardly in the bestowal of those more delicate marks of breeding which, both in man and beast, denote distinction of personality and antiquity of race. Pursy, prolific, Protestant, a commonness pervaded the worthy gentleman's aspect, causing him, as compared with his head clerk, Dominic Iglesias--standing there patiently awaiting his further utterance--to be as is a cheap oleograph to a fine sketch in pen and ink. It may be taken as an axiom that, in body and soul alike, to be deficient in outline is a sad mistake. But of all these little facts and the result of them, Sir Abel was, needless to relate, sublimely ignorant.

"With you, my good friend, it is otherwise," he remarked presently, reluctantly removing his gaze from the portrait of himself. "A beneficent Providence has devised the law of compensation. And we may remark the workings of it everywhere with instruction and encouragement. Hence social obscurity has its compensating advantages. You, for example, are affected by none of those considerations of public obligation binding upon myself. You are so situated that you can avoid the more trying consequences of this universal overstrain. If the demands of the position you now fill are too much for you, you can retire. I congratulate you, Iglesias. For some of us it is impossible, it is forbidden to retire."

The speaker paused, as when in addressing a political or charitable meeting he paused for well-merited applause, secure of having made a telling point. Dominic Iglesias, however, had not applauded. To tell the truth, his back was stiffening a little. He had a very just appreciation of the relative social positions of himself and his employer; still it did not occur to him, somehow, that applause was necessarily in the part.

"You have the redress in your own hands," Sir Abel went on, not without a hint of annoyance. "If you need amus.e.m.e.nt, leisure, rest, they are all within your reach."

Still Iglesias did not speak.

"See now, my good friend, consider. To be practical"--Sir Abel raised his finger and wagged it, with a heavy attempt at _bonhomie_. "You have no family to provide for?"