第73章 CHAPTER XXVIII(1)

Mr. Fentolin, his carriage drawn up close to the beach, was painting steadily when Hamel stood once more by his side. His eyes moved only from the sea to the canvas. He never turned his head.

"So your wooing has not prospered, my young friend," he remarked gently. "I am sorry. Is there anything I can do?"

"Your niece has gone out to lunch," Hamel replied shortly.

Mr. Fentolin stopped painting. His face was full of concern as he looked up at Hamel.

"My dear sir," he exclaimed, "how can I apologise! Of course she has gone out to lunch. She has gone out to Lady Saxthorpe's. I remember the subject being discussed. I myself, in fact, was the instigator of her going. I owe you a thousand apologies, Mr. Hamel.

Let me make what amends are possible for your useless journey.

Dine with us to-night."

"You are very kind."

"A poor amends," Mr. Fentolin continued. "A morning like this was made for lovers. Sunshine and blue sky, a salt breeze flavoured just a little with that lavender, and a stroll through my spring gardens, where my hyacinths are like a field of purple and gold, a mantle of jewels upon the brown earth. Ah, well! One's thoughts will wander to the beautiful things of life. There were once women who loved me, Mr. Hamel."

Hamel looked doubtfully at the strange little figure in the chair.

Was this genuine, he wondered, a voluntary outburst, or was it some subtle attempt to incite sympathy? Mr. Fentolin seemed almost to have read his thought.

"It is not for the sake of your pity that I say this," he continued.

"Mine is only the passing across the line which age as well as infirmity makes inevitable. No one in the world who lives to grow old, and who has loved and felt the fire of it in his veins, can pass that line without sorrow, or look back without a pang. I am among a great army. Well, well, I shall paint no more to-day," he concluded abruptly.

"Where is your servant? " Hamel asked.

Mr. Fentolin glanced around him carelessly.

"He has wandered away out of sight. He knows well how necessary solitude is to me if once I take the brush between my fingers - solitude natural and entire, I mean. If any one is within a dozen yards of me I know it, even though I cannot see them.

Meekins is wandering somewhere the other side of the Tower."

"Shall I call him ?"

"On no account," Mr. Fentolin begged. "Presently he will appear, in plenty of time. There is the morning to be passed - barely eleven o'clock, I think, now. I shall sit in my chair, and sink a little down, and dream of these beautiful lights, these rolling, foam-flecked waves, these patches of blue and shifting green. I can form them in my brain. I can make a picture there, even though my fingers refuse to move. You are not an aesthete, I think, Mr.

Hamel? The study of beauty does not mean to you what it did to your father, and my father, and, in a smaller way to me."

"Perhaps not," Hamel confessed. "I believe I feel these things somewhere, because they bring a queer sense of content with them.

I am afraid, though, that my artistic perceptions are not so keen as some men's."

Mr. Fentolin looked at him thoughtfully.

"It is the physical life in your veins - too splendid to permit you abstract pleasures. Compensations again, you see - compensations.

I wonder what the law is that governs these things. I have forgotten sometimes," he went on, "forgotten my own infirmities in the soft intoxication of a wonderful seascape. Only," he went on, his face a little grey, "it is the physical in life which triumphs.

There are the hungry hours which nothing will satisfy."

His head sank, his chin rested upon his chest. He had all the appearance now of a man who talks in bitter earnest. Yet Hamel wondered. He looked towards the Tower; there was no sign of Meekins.

The sea-gulls went screaming above their heads. Mr. Fentolin never moved. His eyes seemed half closed. It was only when Hamel rose to his feet that he looked swiftly up.

"Stay with me, I beg you, Mr. Hamel," he said. "I am in one of the moods when solitude, even for a moment, is dangerous. Do you know what I have sometimes thought to myself?"

He pointed to the planked way which led down the steep, pebbly beach to the sea.

"I have sometimes thought," he went on, "that it would be glorious to find a friend to stand by my side at the top of the planks, just there, when the tide was high, and to bid him loose my chair and to steer it myself, to steer it down the narrow path into the arms of the sea. The first touch of the salt waves, the last touch of life.

Why not? One sleeps without fear."