The Climber/Chapter 6

by Edward Frederic Benson

CHAPTER VI

The annual visit to Littlestone had been postponed this year, for there was an eminently desirable tenant who wished to take Fair View for the month of September. It was therefore only reasonable to go to Littlestone in September, while Fair View could be occupied, and spend August in Brixham, though August was a month when Brixham was not at its best, since it resembled nothing so much as a hothouse in which were grown plants that smelled of dust. But Lucia had quietly got her own way on this point—so quietly, indeed, that both Aunt Cathie and Aunt Elizabeth thought that they were the originators of the scheme, though the scheme implied a total upset of all the habits of years. For longer than either of them chose to remember, August had been spent at Sea View Cottage, and to spend September there instead seemed subversive of phenomena as established as the fact that the sun rose in the morning. But by the middle of August they both claimed the authorship of the new scheme, and wondered how Lucia could ever have thought that they were going to Sea View in August, since they had a desirable tenant for the house in September, while, as a matter of fact, Lucia had thought of it all, and quietly brought it to pass.

She had excellent reasons for her plan, apart from this question of tenancy, which was sufficient for her aunts. For Lord Brayton was going to be at home all August, and was going to Scotland in September, while Maud Eddis was engaged all August, but wanted to come and stay with Lucia during the later month. She had further ascertained that there was a spare bedroom at Sea View, and that Maud would be a welcome guest. These considerations, however, were not submitted to her aunts, and the question was decided on the grounds of the tenant, about which Lucia cared very little; and thus, though the plan seemed simple and sensible enough, it was not for its superficial sensibleness that she had brought it to pass, but for private reasons of her own. For Brixham would be very empty during August, and she wanted Edgar Brayton to feel dull. Following out his own plan, he had been extremely neighbourly with his county town, and she wished him to find few with whom it was possible to be neighbourly for a few weeks. He had come to both the alternate Tuesdays in July, and had continued to be growingly attentive to her. She wanted to give him the opportunity of making up his mind during a month when he would have few distractions. And in particular she did not want him, after what he had said, to have the distraction of Maud. She wished for his undivided attention.

At the present moment, at any rate, she was getting it. He had come to lunch, since she had ascertained that he had business in Brixham that would occupy him till a quarter to two, and she had received him with a charming "frolic welcome."

"Aunt Elizabeth isn't in," she had said; "but there is cold lamb and Aunt Cathie and me. Or is it I? And I bought a box of cigarettes, and you should have seen the tobacconist in the High Street stare at me, as if I had committed some unspeakable crime in asking for them. I suppose he thought I was going to smoke them myself. Oh, and thank you so much for the first edition of Omar you lent me. Lots of the lines are different in the later edition, and I don't think they are improvements generally, do you? No, don't put your hat down on the gong, please. Have you ever had lunch in so small a house?"

Lunch had been more than successful. Lucia had broken up the lettuce for the salad with her hands, explaining that to touch it with a knife made it taste steely, and had made coffee for him afterwards in the Turkish fashion. There had been no pudding, for she distrusted, from experience, the pastry of the godly Mrs. Inglis, but he had eaten eggs in aspic, cold lamb and salad, biscuits and cheese, and some late cherries gathered from the garden, followed by coffee. Lucia, in fact, had gauged him with a supreme accuracy; she knew that the food was simple and excellent, and knew that he would be pleased at its excellence, and pride himself on his own appreciation of the spirit that directed its simplicity. He would lunch well, and be delighted at his own good taste in liking the absence of parade. For he had lunched, as Lucia knew, being a guest, with Mrs. Wilson, who had covered many dishes with brown sauce; and he had lunched, as Lucia knew, being a guest, with Mrs. Vereker, where there was corked champagne disguised as "cup" in a thick sort of stew of strawberries and angelica, but corked to all eternity; and he had lunched with Mrs. Majendie on flabby salmon and advanced quail. She had been a guest there, too, and saw how obvious it was that the maidservants were not accustomed to handing dishes that were ordinarily dispensed from the table. But here Aunt Cathie gave him an excellent egg, and Lucia gave him a piece of cold lamb, having made the salad during egg-time, and he helped himself to cheese from the sideboard, and put his cherry-stones on to his other plate. It was all simple and calculated, instead of being pompous and unusual. How pompous and unusual, also, had been the conversation at those other depressing banquets! Mrs. Wilson had clung to the Court Circular as to a lifebuoy, and had shown an amazing knowledge of the movements of the Royal Family; Mrs. Vereker had at her fingers' ends the names of those who might be found at Homburg and Marienbad, just as if she had been learning by heart pages of the World; while Mrs. Majendie, with higher flight, knowing he was musical, again discussed the Handel Festival, and knew facts about Schubert which would have been most reliable if she had not got him mixed up with Schumann. Lucia, on the other hand, profiting by these failures, did quite differently: she talked about the difficulty of growing broad beans in a very small garden, and wondered whether they were of nervous constitution, and were disturbed by the passing trains, praised Canterbury bells for growing anywhere with equanimity, and let out casually, as if by accident, that she had set herself to learn "Hamlet" by heart as a holiday task. She had taken his measure exactly.

Before this date Aunt Catherine had got "an idea." She felt quite sure that beneath her very own eyes, and in her very own house, there was going on what she would have called a courtship. She could see—though, of course, Lucia, dear child! was utterly unconscious of it—how immensely attracted Lord Brayton was by her, and with a heroic sacrifice of her own inclinations, since every word, every look, that passed between the two was a matter of the intensest interest to her, she proceeded after lunch to leave them alone in the veranda, in the most natural manner possible, and go down to the kitchen-garden to see about the broad beans which had entered into the conversation at lunch. It was a bad excuse, for she knew that Johnson had " seen about " them last week, and had torn them up by the roots, as they were mere cumberers of the ground. But she trusted that Lucia did not remember that.

For a few minutes after they had gone out he was alone, for Lucia went in to fetch the matches, and he looked round, in strong appreciation of his surroundings, and in perceptible appreciation of himself in appreciating them. Small and simple as was the house and garden, there was a refinement and exquisiteness about it that shone through the wool-work of Aunt Elizabeth, as X rays shine through otherwise opaque substances, and he knew well from whom that emanated. He had lunched in a small villa, only just detached, with a strip of a garden, in an intensely suburban town, but instead of the tedium of forced conversation and pompous display there was culture, humour, naturalness. There was, too, the presence of this girl—a Titian translated into the paler hues of Saxon blood, with golden hair instead of red, but with all the fire and strength of the South. But in this moment's pause, while he was alone, he could not help being gratified at his own perception; where others might only have seen a detached villa and a railway embankment, he saw the courage and the culture that turned them into a house in which he felt at home. With equally fine perceptions also he saw through the rugged brusqueness of Aunt Cathie, divining her devotion for the girl, and not wondering at it. Charlie Lindsay, on the occasion of a garden-party of his own, to which Aunt Catherine had come, had summed her up as a "queer old bird," and seen no farther. That was like Charlie: to him surface was everything. In the same way he had only seen a damned pretty girl in Lucia, and had clearly wished to make an impression on her. From her aloofness, Brayton concluded, rather to his satisfaction, that the impression he had made was an unfortunate one. Lucia was not like that; she was not the sort of girl who wished to flirt with every presentable young man who presented himself.

He had not much time for these satisfactory reflections, for she was soon back again with the matches, and delicately encouraged him to talk about himself. He proceeded to do so, though under the impression that he was talking about other things.

"Yes, I mean to be here a great deal," he said, "for I have no intention of spending my life in London. People say you must be in great towns like London or Paris to keep your intellectual life active, but I do not at all agree. There are pictures, music, theatres in town, of course, but I very much doubt whether most of the effect of those things is not sensuous rather than intellectual."

Lucia leaned forward: she wanted a cigarette, rather badly, but she had heard him express his views about women smoking.

"How do you mean?" she said. "I don't think I quite understand."

"You do though," he said, "because you practise all that I am saying. Music, for instance. In town I can go and hear the Queen's Hall orchestra give a perfect performance of Schubert's "Unfinished," but the true musical, intellectual value of it is better known to you, though you only play it on a cottage piano. You make it your own like that; it becomes part of you. It is the same with painting: the man who knows that Velasquez is, into whom Velasquez has entered, needs no more than a mere photograph of Philip the Fourth, or that wonderful Admiral, to give him the full intellectual feast."

Lucia laughed.

"That is a comfortable doctrine for those of us who have to live in poky little houses beside railway embankments," she said. "Or rather I think it is an uncomfortable one, because whenever one feels that one is rusty and suburban and narrow, you tell me that it is one's own fault."

"But you do not feel rusty and suburban and narrow," he said.

"Ah, don't I! don't I!" said Lucia. "Of course you wouldn't see it—I don't mean to be paying you a compliment, and there is nothing for you to acknowledge—but of course when I am with you I don't feel rusty, because you bring even into this poky little house that atmosphere of the world, of culture, of perception, and naturally that makes one forget the rustiness and the narrowness for a time. I used to be worse than I am. I don't mind telling you that. I used to simply despair at ever getting anything out of life here. Then last May, as lately as that, I turned over a new leaf: I played duets with one girl, I gardened with another, I talked French with a third, and Aunt Cathie joined us. Wasn't it darling of her? and to hear her talk French is quite the funniest thing in the world, the old dear! But I don't want to talk about myself; I am sure the secret of life is to get away from oneself. Or rather——"

Lucia paused for a moment, letting her eyes grow wide and unfocussed.

"Or rather the secret is to be out all day, is it not?" she said, "and come home to oneself in the evening, so to speak, with flowers gathered in one place and tall grasses in another, and arrange them, make them beautify one's home, and then perhaps pass the evening by oneself with them to bear one company—them and the dreams you weave about them, of the dews they were out with, and the winds that have whispered in them. But, but one does want someone to talk to about them. I assure you, Lord Brayton, you are going to be a perfect godsend to us all. Now tell me more of your plans."

Never perhaps had Edgar Brayton been so stirred out of himself. He was definitely interested in this beautiful, vivid girl, not with regard to how she struck him, but with regard to what she herself was.

"No, tell me my plans yourself," he said; "you will make poems out of them."

Lucia cast him a quick glance, and then looked away again over the garden.

"Well, I will prophesy, then," she said. "You will live in your great beautiful house, and year by year it will get more beautiful. You will have pictures there and marbles, and Eastern carpets and exquisite furniture, and all that as a matter of course, but the atmosphere is what will be getting more beautiful, more full of appreciation and criticism and culture. You will bring great parties of great people down from town, and one day there will be acting, and one day a concert, and one day perhaps you will all sit all day in the gardens, talking, reconstructing Life as it should be. How busy you will be, too, for you will be forever thinking of all those who are dependent on you, and bringing beauty into their lives, for I am sure you will care about them immensely. You will make your house the head, the fountain of a new artistic and intellectual movement; you will teach people to see and hear, you will make them understand that it is wiser to think than to eat, and better to be busy than lazy. Lazy! that is the root fault of so many of us! We won't be stirred. But for Heaven's sake, stir us, Lord Brayton! Stir us up like you stir toffee, don't you know, or else it sticks to the side and is burnt and uneatable. Heavens! How lucky you are! What opportunities! What a big life you can make! And now I've quite finished, thank you, and if I have been impertinent, please forget it."

"You have not been impertinent," said he, "but I hope I shall never forget what you have said to me. But I want a little more yet——"

He paused, again leaning forward, again almost absorbed, and more nearly so than before, in not only the beauty and vitality of this girl, but in the future she sketched. In that he, again, was the most important figure, but just as he was absorbed in her, so he was absorbed in her idea for those who surrounded him, his servants, his tenants, not farmers alone, but the inhabitants of such quiet commodious houses as this, which had proved to hold a pearl. And then he tried to banish the personal interest—how he, that is to say, would figure in this Academic Arcadia which she had "washed in" for him, and he framed his question altruistically.

"You said you were sure that I would care immensely about my dependents," he said. "That is vitally true. But make it more practical, dear Miss Grimson——"

Lucia did not move a muscle, or dim the brilliance of her glance by surprise. The check in his speech, after he had said "dear Miss Grimson," was his own, not suggested by her. Indeed, on the moment, he thought that she had not noticed the epithet (which she had), and felt a thrill—though a small one—that there was something in her which answered to that in him which had made him say "dear Miss Grimson." But at the moment he was more interested in her scheme for him than he was either in her or in himself.

"Be more practical," he repeated. "You tell me that I will will make my aims felt by, and fulfilled in, those who surround me. I will not say dependent on me, for that savours of self-consciousness, does it not?"

(It did.)

Lucia carefully and naturally looked back from the railway embankment to him.

"No, it is a phrase merely," she said; "we mean the same people. Whether we say that they depend or surround, does not matter. But I chose to say dependents. By them I mean your scullery-maid, and your boot-boy, and your farmers, and your friends, and your tenants—we, I mean, who live in your houses."

"And I want to have friends among all those," he said. "You class my friends as separate from my servants and my farmers and my tenants. May I not have friends among them?"

This was an opportunity for a girl a little less clever than Lucia, though quite as determined a flirt, to set a new and more personal scene for the conversational drama. She could easily and naturally have said that he probably already had many friends among the tenants of this residential quarter, which would narrow and shape the field at once, leading it to a point. But she had the wit not to do so.

She laughed, with a little deprecating movement of her arms towards him.

"Oh, be quiet, Lord Brayton," she said, "and don't interrupt your practical prophetess. Dependents, dependents; where were we? Yes, quite so; I mean just that—your scullery-maid, and your boot-boy, and your farmers, and so on. You want and you mean to raise the level, artistically, intellectually. You want everybody about you to care for what is lovely—that is the best word, is it not? for it means so much—and you want to know how begin, though why you ask me to tell you, I can't conjecture. It's no use hanging up Botticelli photographs in the kitchen, or putting a Raphael print in the odd-man's room, or leaving a Shelley in the stables, or whistling the "Unfinished" below the window of your chauffeur, or starting a Shakespeare Society in Brixham, or a literary causerie once a month at—at the Laburnums. Let me think a moment that is not the way, though perhaps some of those things are part of the way. You may see a big stone in a field, where you want to make a road, and though that stone won't make a road, yet it is only by using stones, and breaking them up, that your road will be made. Wait a moment!"

He was quite willing to wait a moment. Her beauty, her vitality, her enthusiasm, her understanding of hiss aims was all worth waiting for. Then she leaned forward, clasping her hands together between her knees, and looked at him straight, speaking quite slowly and weighing her words.

"Be yourself," she said—"be yourself in the truest sense. Pamper your passion for all the things that are lovely. Don't take the scullery-maid by the scruff of the neck, and say, 'Admire that Reynolds, or I give you a week's warning!' but work at everybody on their own lines. Ah, that is just it! That was said as I meant it! Be yourself and be detailed; surround yourself first of all with all that your own sure taste tells you is lovely, and you may be certain that the instinct of perfection will spread. But it will spread by perfection in many lines. Your chef—oh, I am sure this is so, and I will tell you why soon—will come to your room for orders (see your servants yourself, by the way), and something of the atmosphere of you will infect him. He will do his very best in his line. The man who cleans the plate will do his best, when he gradually is infected with the atmosphere of the best. Does it sound ridiculous? If so I will stop."

"Don't dare to stop," he said. "It is the best sense!"

"Well, I believe it is sense. Certainly a careless, slovenly, unappreciative mistress makes her servants like her; it is certain that the converse holds. It will hold, you may be sure, with regard to your farmer-tenants; they will see perfection in all that surrounds you, and they will tend to imitate. For imitation is the most natural and primal instinct of all, though it may happen to be flattery. Even so it is sincere, according to the proverb. So far, of course, it is easy; your servants naturally follow you. And the plate-man will clean the plate better, and will look out for other perfections, and the chef will cook better, and find that his concertina—or whatever chefs play—is not up to the mark. That is it again! You want your dependents to feel that they are not up to the mark. As I say, that is easily done with those who surround you, who come in contact with you."

Lucia was quite genuine in all that she had said, and it would be an injustice to assume that she had said this with a personal purpose. He had taken it, too, in the genuine spirit, though if Aunt Cathie had said exactly the same things in the same words, he might not have cared so much about her enunciations. Then, however, having led the conversation away when she could have made it personal, Lucia brought it swiftly back again. She only wanted a few personal words, and those only distantly personal, but it was necessary to have them now, since the handkerchief which Aunt Cathie had put over her head when she went to look at the broad-beans was bobbing nearer.

"Of course, it is more difficult with regard to your dependents here, the tenants in your houses," she said, "since"—and the phrase was intentionally sarcastic—"since you hope to benefit us also——"

He had to put in a disclaimer, which was exactly what Lucia meant him to do. It brought him back to thinking about her and himself.

"Hope to benefit," he exclaimed; "you make me out——" He probably would have used the word "prig," but she interrupted.

"I make you out a benefactor," she said. "That is what you have got to be. You have all, absolutely all, that can make life lovely, and you must use it not only for your servants, but for us, please—us, the inhabitants of this very, very provincial town. Ah, by the way, I said I would give you a proof of how servants direct dependents, are influenced. It is just this. There is a parlour-maid here called Jane. She used to sing "Two Lovely Black Eyes" when she was washing up. But now she sings the melody of the first movement of the "Unfinished." It is quite excruciating, but recognizable. That is the principle; multiply it by a hundred thousand for your own case."

He laughed.

"This very provincial town?" he suggested, leading her back, and wishing Aunt Cathie did not walk so quickly up the garden path.

"Yes; we want to be stirred, to be made busy with beautiful things. Set us an example, for, as I said, there is no instinct so strong as the imitative, and—ah, dear Aunt Cathie, how are the beans?"

Lucia rose, as if to join her aunt. Then she turned to him once more, and spoke quickly and low the last private words they would have together just now.

"Show us a man who does not live on the suburban scale," she said, "who is wide and busy. We want—we want radium!"

Edgar went back to Brayton that afternoon with a braced and tingling mind. Lucia had put into words for him all that had been as yet but of the consistency of thought. Her ideal life, it seemed, was just the ideal life which he had intended and meant to aim at and to realize, but which hitherto had seemed distant and elusive. She, with her practical grasp, had taken him and led him right up to it, made him look it in the face, made him convince himself that the stuff of which his dreams were made was capable of being materialized. She did not shirk the details or blur the outlines of them; she did not, either, shirk the difficulties, or think that the artistic intellectual life which he wanted to bring within the reach of those round him was to be done by putting Botticellis in the still-room and copies of standard works in the stables. And how right she was throughout! He must create the atmosphere, which should spread like the flooding light of dawn, not manufacture little pillules of culture and give them to other people to eat. How well she understood!

Though he knew that it was he who was to be the centre of this, and though that knowledge intensely gratified him, he scarcely thought of himself as the centre, but of the rest of the circle to its farthest circumference. What if a great renaissance, a return to the love of art, of culture, began to dawn? Mixed with the senseless and selfish expenditure that went on in the world, he believed there to be great quickness of intelligence, great eagerness for new ideas, great love of the beautiful thought that again was largely subject to the dictates of what was called fashion. If only he could help, though ever so slightly, to bring that about, how noble an achievement, and how worthy of utmost and tireless effort!

Then, even in the middle of these reflections, a train of thought more vivid than they drew its shining furrow like a comet across his brain, and it was illuminated with the image of her who had made his own aims so dazzlingly real to him. She had spoken like one inspired; it was as if the spirit of the culture and loveliness of which she spoke had become incarnate in her. And then he knew that he was thinking no more about what she said, but about the girl who said it.

He was alone in the house that night, though he expected guests next day, and, as was his custom when by himself, dined with frugality on a couple of dishes, intending to spend a long evening among his books. There was a volume of French memoirs of the years preceding the Revolution that he was eager to read, and had just begun, but to-night the splendour of the time seemed dimmed to him. The gold and the carving were there, the sound of its flutes and the measure of its dances, but below in the cellar of the house beautiful were darkness and mildew and rotting foundations. Sounds of cracking and falling mingled with the music of the flutes, and it was not only with the swift feet of the dancers that the floor shook. The witty, lighthearted pages seemed blistered with some corruption that came from within; the laughter was not sound; the flute-player eyed the dancers with stealthy, hating glances.

He shut the book up quickly. It was not from a rotten, decaying stem that the true flowers sprang, nor from a tainted soil. "Pamper your passion for what is lovely "—those were Lucia's words, but, "lovely means so much," she said also. She had understood him so well; here it seemed that he understood her as completely. The loveliness must begin from within; he was sure she meant that.

Radium! She had said that Brixham needed radium. He understood that also; it wanted, and the whole world wanted, those who by their own nature burned and were unconsumed; those whose property was light that came not from the combustion of other things, but from their own illuminating nature. He had seen radium, he thought, in Brixham that day—even her who had spoken of it. And he became aware that he was thinking of her herself again, not what she said, not what she did, except in so far that these. things were an expression of her and of her enthusiasm.

The big drawing-room where he sat was lit by electric light that was hidden behind the cornice, and made an illuminated field of the ceiling. There were but half a dozen pictures on the walls—four superb Corots, and a couple of Turners of the second period. Each of these had its own light, and the six glorious canvases were like windows in the dull gold of the walls. From one window there came the faint, dove-coloured light of morning; from another there poured in the blaze of noonday; from the third was seen the crimson splash left behind by the sunken sun; from another there looked in the velvet blue of night. In one Turner the sea rose mountainously to meet a thunder-laden sky, and in the other canvas all Italy sparkled. At the far end of the room the tall French window on to the veranda and the lawn was open, while the drawn brocade curtains just stirred in the nightwind. And when he saw that dark space, Edgar knew it was not the pictured blaze of noonday, nor the riot of southern sun that he needed, nor yet the stillness of the painted night, but night itself, with the real stars burning above him, and the veiled fragrance of dewy flowers. As for the book he had looked forward to reading, it was an unspeakable thing.

He went out, and walked slowly at first, but with increasing speed, as his thoughts drove him down the dewy lawn. The lake in front was dark, for the most part, with the broad leaves of the water-lilies, but between them were little bits of reflected sky, in which the starlight smouldered. Beyond lay the dark grey spaces of the downs, and beyond, again, a brightness as of molten amber suffused the sky above the lights of Brixham. And though to right and left of him the dim dusk was exquisite with the odour of the flower-beds and the smell of the dewy grass, in spite of the magic of the night, it was towards these lights that his eyes were set. Yet unconsciously the other voices of the earth spoke to him, too; in the utter simplicity and humanness of the love that was beginning to beckon to him, he got more out of himself and into closer touch with Nature than he had ever been, and for once he ceased to think what he felt, but was content to feel. Now and then, from mere force of habit, he tried to register sensations, to remind himself of the beauty of the still night, but he could not actively attend to his own feelings for long, since he was busy feeling. Something from outside was beginning to call to him—no echo of his own voice, no sense of his own appreciation of romantic surroundings, but something apart from him—a star that sang. From the amber of the light in the sky above Brixham it sang.

Love was dawning for him, and in the light of that uprising sun the shining and glow of his other aims, which had so filled his mind to-day, burned like the quenched lights of heaven. Even Lucia's appreciation of them, her understanding of them, her instinct that led her so unerringly to show himself to himself, faded, and it was she who mattered, she of the golden hair and enraptured eye and beautiful soul. Tremblingly he dared to hope, too, that something of this dawn-light was gilding the sky for her; she could scarcely have divined him so surely if he had been indifferent to her. And he did not come to her empty-handed: their aims were one, and on the material plane of rank and riches he could give her what it was idle to despise.

Yet how little all that would be to her—she who with her beautiful noble nature made of that narrow home, that strip of garden, something royal and splendid. The big scale was hers, and in nothing was that more wonderfully shown than in her dealing with little things. How tiresome, how cramping and paralyzing must that life with the two elderly aunts have been to any with large tastes and fine feelings, who had not also courage and character and a great heart! It was a touching and beautiful thing to see her tenderness and affectionate solicitude for Aunt Cathie, who to the general eye, though kindly disposed, appeared to be a very gruff and tough old lady. Lucia had broken off what he felt certain was to her a most absorbing talk, not only without impatience, but with such kindly welcome for her aunt when she returned from the inspection of the broad beans. She had scolded her gently for not putting on her hat when going out into the sunshine, and blamed herself for not having seen that she had done so. Then she dragged up a basket-chair for her, took the cushion out of that in which she had been sitting to make a "soft back" for her aunt, and with gaiety and laughter talked of the hundred trivialities that made up the elder woman's life and interests. She had not allowed herself to be benumbed by what she frankly confessed was a very provincial town; she had kept her light shining, and not suffered it to burn dim or get quenched by the unoxidized atmosphere. That was courage; that was character; wherever she was, whatever station in life she occupied, she would keep herself up to her own mark, not be cramped with other people's limitations, not be dulled with the rust of other minds.

The great clock in the turret above the gate chimed a long, mellow hour, and he walked back across the terrace to the lit oblong of the drawing-room window. It was a little dazzling to the eye to come out of the dark into the strong light of the room, and something of the glitter and beauty of the room correspondingly dazzled his mind, chasing from it the thoughts that had been his out in the dark, and substituting for them more material considerations. Indeed, he did not come to her empty-handed; in the vulgar phrase of the world, which came into his mind only to be condemned, he knew that he was a great match, and that the world (again vulgarly) would feel that it had been cheated if he married Lucia. But for that he cared not at all; if anything, indeed, so far as just now he gave it consideration, he was rather gratified at the thought that it should be so. A marriage for love was the only reason for a marriage at all.

And then the thoughts of the dark and of the amber light above Brixham and of her who dwelt there swept all else away again, and he was borne out of himself by the embracing tide that was beginning to flow so strongly about him. He was not quite carried off his feet yet, for, as has been seen, he was one of those who are apt to stand very firmly upon them, but already he rocked to and fro in the stream of the current that came not from within him, but from without.