Antony Gray,—Gardener - LM

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second queer little entry on the scene the more miraculous of the two.

      He opened the book, and there, facing him from the fly-leaf, was the answer to the question he had erstwhile sought to fathom—Pia di Donatello. His lips formed the syllables, dwelling with pleasure on the first three little letters—Pia. Oh, it was right, it was utterly and entirely right. Every other possibility vanished before it into the remotest background, unthinkable in the face of what was. Pia di Donatello! Again he repeated the musical syllables. And yet—and yet—he’d have sworn she was English. There wasn’t the faintest trace of a foreign accent in her speech. If anything, there was a hint of Irish—the soft intonation of the Emerald Isle. Her colouring, too, was Irish, the blue-black hair, the dark violet eyes—he had discovered that they were violet; looking, for all the world, as if they had been put in with a smutty finger, as the saying goes. He revolved the problem in his mind, and a moment later came upon the solution, so he told himself. An Irish mother, and an Italian father, so he decreed, metaphorically patting himself on the back the while for his perspicacity.

      The problem settled, he turned himself to the contents of the book as set forth by the author thereof, rather than the three words inscribed on the fly-leaf by the owner. They were not hard of digestion. The print was large, the matter light. Anon he came to Mutabile Semper and the death letters, and, having read them, and laughed in concord with the erstwhile laugh of the book’s owner, he closed the pages, and gazed out upon the sunshine and the water.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      Emerson has written a discourse on friendship. It is beautifully worded, truly; it is full of a noble and high-minded philosophy. Doubtless it will appeal quite distinctly to those souls who, although yet on this earth-plane, have already partly cast off the mantle of flesh, and have found their paths to lie in the realm of spirit. Even to those, and it is by far the greater majority, who yet walk humdrumly along the world’s great highway, the kingdom of the spirit perceived by them as in a glass darkly rather than by actual light shed upon them from its realm, it may bring some consolation during the absence of a friend. But for the general run of mankind it is set on too lofty a level. It lacks the warmth for which they crave, the personality and intercourse.

      “I do then, with my friends as I do with my books,” he says. “I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.”

      Now, it is very certain that, for the majority of human beings, the friendliest books are worn with much handling. If we picture for a moment the bookshelves belonging to our childish days, we shall at once mentally discover our old favourites. They have been used so often. They have been worn in our service. No matter how well we know the contents, we turn to them again and again; there is a very joy in knowing what to expect. Time does not age nor custom stale the infinite variety.

      Thus it is in our childish days. And are not the majority of us still children? Should our favourite books be placed out of our reach, should it be impossible for us to turn their pages, it is certain that we would feel a loss, a gap. Were we old enough to comprehend Emerson’s philosophy, we might endeavour to buoy ourselves up with the thought that thus we were at one with him in his nobility and loftiness of sentiment. And yet there would be something childish and pathetic in the endeavour, by reason of its very unreality. Certainly if Providence should, either directly or indirectly, separate us from our friends, by all means let us accept the separation bravely. It cannot destroy our friendship. But seldom to use our friends, from the apparently epicurean point of view of Emerson, would be a forced and unnatural doctrine to the majority, as unnatural as if a child should bury Hans Andersen’s fairy tales for fear of tiring of them. It would savour more of present and actual distaste, than the love which fears its approach. There is the familiarity which breeds contempt, truly; but there is also the familiarity which daily ties closer bonds, draws to closer union.

      Antony had established a friendship with the lady of the blue book. The book had been responsible for its beginning. With Emerson’s definition of friendship he would probably have been largely in harmony; not so in his treatment of it. With the following, he would have been at one, with the exception of a word or so:—“I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine—wild, delicate, throbbing property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his, his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.”

      Most true, Antony would have declared, if you will eliminate “over-estimate,” and substitute “is” for “seems.”

      Unlike Emerson, he made no attempt to analyse his friendship. He accepted it as a gift from the gods. Maybe somewhere in his inner consciousness, barely articulate even to his own heart, he dreamt of it as a foundation to something further. Yet for the present, the foundation sufficed. Death-letters—he laughed joyously at the coincidence—had laid the first stone, and each day placed others in firm and secure position round it. The building was largely unconscious. It is the way with true friendship. The life, also, conduced to it. There are fewer barriers of convention on board ship than in any other mode of living. Mrs. Grundy, it is to be supposed, suffers from sea-sickness, and does not care for this method of travelling. In fact, it would appear that she seldom does travel, but chooses by preference small country towns, mainly English ones, for her place of residence.

      The days were days of sunshine and colour, the changing colour of sea and sky; the nights were nights of mystery, veiled in purple, star-embroidered.

      One day Pia made clear to him the explanation of her Irish colouring and her Italian surname. Her mother, she told him, was Irish; her father, English. Her baptismal name had been chosen by an Italian godmother. She was eighteen when she married the Duc di Donatello. On their wedding day, when driving from the church, the horses had bolted. She had been uninjured; he had received serious injuries to his head and spine. He had lived for seven years as a complete invalid, totally paralysed, but fully conscious. During those seven years, she had never left him. Two years previously he had died, and she had gone to live at her old home in England—the Manor House, Woodleigh, which had been in the hands of caretakers since her parents’ death. Her husband’s property had passed to his brother. The last six months she had been staying with a friend at Wynberg.

      She told the little tale extremely simply. It never occurred to her to expect sympathy on account of the tragedy which had marred her youth, and by reason of which she had spent seven years of her life in almost utter seclusion. The fact was merely mentioned in necessary explanation of her story. Antony, too, had held silence. Sympathy on his part would have been somehow an intrusion, an impertinence. But he understood now, in part at least, the steady gravity, the hint of sadness in her eyes.

      The name of Woodleigh awoke vague memories in his mind, but they were too vague to be noteworthy. Possibly, most probably, he told himself, he had merely read of the place at some time. She mentioned that it was in Devonshire, but curiously enough, and this was an omission which he noted later with some surprise, he never questioned her as to its exact locality.

      On his side, he told her of his life on the veldt, and mentioned that he was returning to England on business. On the outcome of that same business would depend the question whether he remained in England, or whether he returned to the veldt. Having the solicitor’s injunction in view, he naturally did not volunteer further information. Such details, too, sank into insignificance before the more absorbing interest of personality. They are, after all, in a sense, mere accidents, and have no more to do with the real man than the clothes he wears. True, the manner in which one dons one’s clothes, as the manner in which one deals with the accidental facts of life,

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