"Others have found it so," he said. "I go to prove their words."
"You are a stranger there, then?"
"I have never been further south than this in my life," he replied. "I know only the London of De Quincey and Lamb-London with the halo of romance around it."
She sighed gently.
"You will find it all so different," she said. "You will be bitterly disappointed."
He set his lips firmly together.
"I have no fear," he said. "I shall find it possible to live there, at any rate. If I stayed where I was, I must have gone mad."
"You are going to friends?" she asked.
He laughed softly.
"I have not a friend in the world," he said. "In London I do not know a soul. What matter? There is life to be lived there, prizes to be won.
There is room for every one."
She half closed her eyes, watching him keenly all the time with an interest which was certainly not diminished.
"London is a wonderful city," she said, "but she is not always kind to the stranger. You have spoken of De Quincey who wove fairy fancies about her, and Lamb, who was an affectionate stay-at-home, a born dweller in cities. They were dreamers both, these men. What about Chatterton?"
"An unhappy exception," he said. "If only he had lived a few months longer his sorrows would have been over."
"To-day," she said, "there are many Chattertons who must die before the world will listen to them. Are you going to take your place amongst them?"
He smiled confidently.
"Not I," he answered. "I shall work with my hands if men will have none of my brains. Indeed," he continued, turning towards her with a swift, transfiguring smile, "I am not a village prodigy going to London with a pocketful of ma.n.u.scripts. Don"t think that of me. I am going to London because I have been stifled and choked--I want room to breathe, to see men and women who live. Oh, you don"t know the sort of place I have come from--the brain poison of it, the hideous sameness and narrowness of it all."
"Tell me a little," she said, "and why at last you made up your mind to leave. It is not so long, you know, since I saw you in somewhat different guise."
A quick shiver seemed to pa.s.s through him; underneath his tanned skin he was paler, and the blood in his veins was cold. His eyes, fixed upon the flying landscape, were set in a fixed, unseeing stare--surely the fields were peopled with evil memories, and faces in the trees were mocking him. So he remained for several moments as though in the grip of a nightmare, and the lady watched him. There was a little tragedy, then, behind.
"There was a man once," he said, "who drew a line through his life, and said to himself that everything behind it concerned some other person--not him. So with me. Such memories as I have, I shall strangle. To-day I commence a new life."
She sighed.
"One"s past" she said, "is not always so easily to be disposed of.
There are ghosts which will haunt us, and sometimes the ghosts are living figures."
"Let them come to me," he murmured, "and my fingers shall be upon their throats. I want no such legacies."
She shook her head slowly.
"Ghosts" she said, with a faint smile, "are sometimes very difficult people to deal with."
CHAPTER IV
EXIT MR. DOUGLAS GUEST
Through the heart of England the express tore on--through town and country, underneath the earth and across high bridges. All the while the man and the woman talked. To him she was a revelation. Every moment of his life had been spent in a humdrum seclusion--every moment of hers seemed to have been lived out to its limit in those worlds of which he had barely even dreamed. She was older than he had thought her--thirty, perhaps, or thirty-one--and her speech and gestures every now and then had a foreign flavour. She talked to him of countries which he had scarcely dared hope to visit, and of men and women whose names were as household words. She spoke of them with an ease and familiarity which betokened close acquaintance--talking to him with a mixture of kindness and reserve as if he were some strange creature who had had the good fortune to interest her for the moment, but from whom at any time she might draw aloof. Every word she spoke he hung upon.
He had come out into the world to seek for adventures--not, indeed, in the spirit of the modern Don Quixote, tingling only for new sensations to stimulate; but with the more robust and breezy spirit of his ancestors, seeking for a fuller life and a healthy excitement, even at the cost of hard blows and many privations. Surely this was an auspicious start--an adventure this indeed! During a momentary silence she looked across at him with genuine curiosity, her eyes half closed, her brows knitted. What enthusiasm! She was not a vain woman, and she knew that her personality had little, if anything, to do with the flush upon his cheeks and the bright light in his eyes. She herself, a much travelled, a learned, a brilliant, even a famous woman, had become only lately conscious of a certain jaded weariness in her outlook upon life.
Even the best had begun to pall, the sameness of it had commenced its fatal work. More than once lately a touch of that heart languor, which is the fruit of surfeit, had startled her by its numbing and depressing effect. Here at last was a new type--a man with clean pages before him--young, emotional, without a doubt intellectual. But for his awful clothes he was well enough to look upon, he had no affectations, his instincts were apparently correct. His manners were hoydenish, but there was nothing of the clown about him. She asked him a direct question concerning himself.
"Tell me," she said, "what you really are. A worker, a student--or have you a trade?"
He flushed up to his brows.
"I was brought up" he said, in a low tone, "for the ministry. It was no choice of mine. I had an uncle and guardian who ruled our household as he ruled everybody and everything with which he came in contact."
She was puzzled. To her the word sounded political.
"The ministry?"
"Yes. You remember when you first saw me? It was my first appearance.
I was to have been chosen pastor of that church."
"Oh!"
She looked at him now with something like amazement. This, then, accounted for the sombreness of his clothes and his little strip of white tie. She had only the vaguest ideas as to the conduct of those various sects to be met with in English villages, but she had certainly believed that the post of preacher was filled indifferently by any member of the congregation, and she had looked upon his presence in the pulpit on that last Sunday as an accident. To a.s.sociate him with such an occupation permanently seemed to her little short of the ridiculous.
She laughed softly, showing, for the first time, her brilliantly white teeth, and his cheeks were stained with scarlet.
"I do not know why you laugh," he said, with a note of fierceness in his tone. "It is the part of my life which is behind me. I was brought up to it, and traditions are hard to break away from. I have been obliged to live in a little village, to constrain my life between the narrowest limits, to watch ignorance, and suffer prejudices as deeply rooted as the hills. But all the same, it is nothing to laugh at. The thing itself is great and good enough--it is the people who are so hopeless.
No, there is nothing to laugh at," he cried, with a sudden little burst of excitement, "but may G.o.d help the children whose eyes He has opened and who yet have to pa.s.s their lives on the smallest treadmill of the world."
"You" she whispered, "have escaped."
"I have escaped," he murmured, with a sudden pallor, "but not scatheless."
There was a silence between them then. She recognised that she had made a mistake in questioning him about a past which he had already declared hateful. The terror of an hour or more ago was in his face again. He was back amongst the shadows whence she had beckoned him. She yawned and took up her book.
They stopped at a great station, but the man was in a brown study and scarcely moved his head. An angry guard came hurrying up to the window, but a few words from the lady and a stealthily opened purse worked wonders. They were left undisturbed, and the train glided off. She laid down her book and spoke again.
"Do you mind pa.s.sing me my luncheon basket?" she said, "and opening that flask of wine? Are you not hungry, too?"
He shook his head, but when he came to think of it he knew that he was ravenous. She pa.s.sed him sandwiches as a matter of course--such sandwiches as he had never eaten before--and wine which was strange to him and which ran through his veins like warm magic. Once more the load of evil memories seemed to pa.s.s away from him. He was not so much at ease eating and drinking with her, but she easily acquired her former hold upon him. She herself, whose appet.i.te was a.s.sumed, watched him, and wondered more and more.
Suddenly there came an interruption. The shrill whistling of the engine, the shutting off of steam, the violent application of the brake.
The train came to a standstill. The man put down the window and looked out.
"What is it?" she asked, with admirable nonchalance, making no effort to leave her seat.
"I think that there has been an accident to some one," he said. "I will go and see."