The House of Baltazar. William John Locke

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      One day, business calling her to London, she changed into mufti, and hurried down the front steps to the car that was to take her to the station. She found Godfrey waiting by the car door.

      “My word! You look topping!” he cried in blatant admiration, and she blushed with pleasure like a girl.

      He begged for a jaunt to the station and back. The air would do him good. She assented, and they drove off.

      “You look younger than ever,” he went on. “It’s a sin to hide your beautiful hair under that wretched Sister’s concern. Now I see really the kind of woman you are——”

      “What have clothes got to do with it?”

      “Lots. The way you select them, the way you put them on, the way you express yourself in them. No one can express themselves in a beastly uniform. Now, all kinds of instincts, motives, feelings, went into that hat. There’s a bit of defiance in it. As who should say: ‘Now that I’m an ordinary woman again, demureness be damned!’ ”

      She said: “I’m glad I meet with your lordship’s approval,” and she felt absurdly happy for the rest of the day. In her heart she thanked God that he regarded her not merely as a kind old thing to whom, as a link between himself and his father, he was benevolently disposed. Out of sight, she would then be out of his mind. But she held her own as a woman; unconsciously had held it all the time. Now the little accident of the meeting in mufti secured her triumph. When he left the home he would not drift away from her.

      He had said on the platform, waiting for her train:

      “As soon as we can fix it up, I’ll get hold of Dorothy, and you and I and she’ll have a little beano at the Carlton. I do so want her to meet you.”

      The wish, she reflected afterwards, signified much: Dorothy to meet her, not she to meet Dorothy. The kind old thing, as a matter of boyish courtesy, would be asked to meet Dorothy. But Dorothy was to meet somebody in whom he took a certain pride.

      She remembered a story told her by a friend who had gone to see her boy at a famous public school on the occasion of the Great Cricket Match. At the expansive moment of parting he said: “Mother, I suppose you know that the men feel it awfully awkward being seen with their people, but as you were out and away the most beautiful woman in the crowd, I went about not caring a hang.”

      She would have to get herself up very smart for Dorothy. In the train coming back she fell a-dreaming. If John Baltazar and she had stuck it out in all honour for a few years, Death, which was in God’s hands and not theirs, would have solved all difficulties. They would have been married. The five-year-old child would have called her “mother.” She would be “mother” still to this gallant lad whose youth and charm had suddenly swept through the barren chambers of her heart. And in the night she asked again the question which in the agonized moments of past years she had cried to the darkness: “Why?”

      Why had he left her? If he had been strong enough to keep love within the bounds of perfect friendship, she, the unawakened girl, living in passionate commune with intellectual and spiritual ideals, would have found for some years, at least, all her cravings satisfied in such a tender and innocent intercourse. And if he had claimed her body and her soul, God knows they were his for the taking.

      So why? Why the breaking of so many lives? His own, so vivid, most of all.

      In the quivering splendour of her one girlish month of love, a distracted Semele, she had scarcely seen her Jovian lover, as he was in human form. She pictured him, Heaven knows how romantically. But always, in her picturing, she took for granted the canon of chiaroscuro, of light and shade. In judging him afterwards, she had no conception of a being to whom compromise was damnation. A phrase—an instinctive cutter of Gordian knots—might have brought illumination; but there was none to utter it.

      She was amazed, dumbfounded, conscience-stricken, all but soul-destroyed, when the astounding fact of John Baltazar’s disappearance became known. The familiar houses and trees and hedges on the Newnham Road pointed to her as accusing witnesses. Yet she kept her own counsel, and, keeping it, suffered to breaking-point. Many months passed before she could look life again squarely in the face—and then it was the new life that had lasted for so many years. And still, with all her experience of human weakness and human fortitude, she lay awake asking herself the insoluble question.

      So little occasion had been given for scandal, that her name was associated in no man or woman’s mind with the extraordinary event. Clue to John Baltazar’s disappearance, save the notorious shrewishness of his wife, there was none. Common Rooms, heavy with the secular atmosphere of casuistic argument, speculated in vain. A man of genius, destined to bring the University once more into world-wide fame—watched, therefore, by the University with sedulous care and affection; a man with the prizes of the earth (from the academic point of view) dangling within his grasp, does not, they contended, forsake all and go out into the darkness because his wife happens to be a scold. Another woman? To Common Rooms the idea was preposterous. Besides, if there had been one, the married members would have picked up in their homes the gossip of one of the most nervous gossip centres in the United Kingdom. Mad, perhaps? But Mrs. Baltazar proclaimed loudly the sagacious method by which he realized his private fortune, before setting out for the Unknown. And Common Rooms, like Marcelle, asked the same perplexing question: Why?

      The next day, in the grounds of Churton Towers, the young man, returning to his father’s fascinating mystery, propounded the dilemma that had kept her from sleep the night before, and he, in his turn, asked: “Why?”

      “The only solution of it is,” said he, “that he burned the house down in order to roast the pig.”

      She flashed a glance at him. “You seem to know him better than I.”

      At that moment, John Baltazar, about whom there was all this coil, leaning over the gate of a derelict and remote moorland farmstead, perhaps asked himself the same question; for in moments of intellectual and physical relaxation he was wont, like most solitaries, to look down the vista of his years.

      A low granite wall, in which was set the wooden gate, encircled the few acres of his domain. Behind him, a one-storied, granite-built, thatched dwelling and the adjoining stable and byre and pigsties and dismantled dairy. Surrounding the buildings, with little selection as to appropriateness of site, were flower garden, mostly of herbaceous plants, vegetable garden, wire-enclosed poultry runs variegated with White Wyandottes and Rhode Island Reds, and half an acre of rough grass on which some goats were tethered.

      John Baltazar leaned over the gate and, smoking his cherry-wood pipe, gazed with the outer eye on the familiar scene of desolate beauty. Within his horizon he was the only visible human being, his the only human habitation. All around him spread the rolling landscape of granite and heather and wind-torn shrub. The granite hills, some surmounted by gigantic and shapeless masses of rock left freakishly behind in glacial movements of unknown times, glowed amethyst and pale coral; the heather slopes in the sunlight blazed in the riot of royal purple, and the shadowed plains lay in a sullen majesty of gloom. Heather and granite, granite and heather, moorland and mountain, beauty and barrenness. God and granite and heather. No place for man. No more a place for man than the Sahara. For man, to his infinite despair, had tried it; had built the rude farmstead, had, Heaven knows why—perhaps through pathetic pride of ownership—with infinite sweating, piled up the three-foot ring of stones, had sought to cultivate the illusory covering of earth, had dug till his sinews cracked and turned up the eternal granite instead of clods, and had sickened and starved and died; and had abandoned the stricken place to the unhelpful sun and the СКАЧАТЬ