Then Rosamund Severne said in a dreadful dead voice; “He always tells the truth.”
“I think you are the noblest woman in the world,” said Olive.
“Only the most unlucky,” said the other. “It is nobody’s fault. It’s as if there were a curse on this place.”
And in that instant of time Olive received a revelation like a blinding light; and understood her own trembling in the shadow of those watching walls.
“Rosamund, there is a curse on the place,” she said. “There’s a curse because there is a blessing. But it’s nothing to do with anything we have ever talked about. It has nothing to do with anything that man said. It’s not a curse on your name or anybody else’s name, whatever your name is or whether it’s old or new. The curse is in the name of this house.”
“The name of this house,” repeated the other in a dull voice.
“You’ve seen it at the top of your note-paper a thousand times and taken it for granted; and you have never seen that that is the falsehood. It doesn’t matter whether your father’s position is false or not: it doesn’t matter whether it’s old or new. This place doesn’t belong to the old families any more than the new families. It belongs to God.”
Rosamund seemed to stiffen suddenly like a literal statue and yet one could swear the statue had ears to hear.
Olive burst out again with her broken soliloquy; “Why have all our toppling fancies about kings and knights come with a crash; why is all our Round Table ruined? Because we never began at the beginning. Because we never went back to the Thing itself. The Thing that produced everything else; the love of the Thing where it really lives. On this spot long ago two hundred men lived and loved It.”
She stopped and seemed to realise that her words were tumbling out in a tail foremost fashion; and that she was herself, hardly setting a good example of beginning at the beginning. She made a desperate effort at clarity.
“Don’t you see–the modern people may be right to be modern; there may be people who ask for nothing better than banks and brokers; there may be people who think Milldyke a nice place. Your father and his friends may have been right in their way; I’m sure they weren’t so wrong as they looked when he was abusing them . . . it was hateful, and anyhow he had no business to spring it on you like that, without telling you beforehand.”
The statue spoke again; it seemed as if it never spoke except to utter one sort of stony defence.
“He did tell me beforehand. And I think that was more terrible.”
“Let me say what I am trying to say,” said 0live pathetically. “I feel as if it didn’t belong to me, and I must give it away. There may be people to whom it’s senseless to talk about a flower of chivalry; it sounds like a blossom of butchery. But if we want the flower of chivalry, we must go right away back to the root of chivalry. We must go back if we find it in a thorny place people call theology. We must think differently about death and free will and loneliness and the last appeal. It’s just the same with the popular things we can turn into fashionable things; folk-dances and pageants and calling everything a Guild. Our fathers did these things by the thousand; quite common people; not cranks. We are always asking how they did it. What we’ve got to ask is why they did it. . . . Rosamund, this is why they did it. Something lived here. Something they loved. Some of them loved it so much. . . . Oh don’t you and I know what is the only test? They wanted to be alone with it.”
The statue moved ever so faintly as if turning away; and Olive clutched the arm again in a sort of remorse.
“You must think me mad to be talking so when you suffer; but it’s as if I were bursting with news–with something bigger than all the universe of sorrow. Rosamund, there really is joy. Not rejoicing but joy; not rejoicing at this or that; but the thing itself, we only see reflected in mirrors– which sometimes break. And it lived here. That’s why they didn’t want anything else; not even what we want; not even the best we know. . . . And that’s what’s gone–the good itself. Now we have only evils to hate, and thank God we hate them.”
She pointed suddenly at the monument in the middle of which the wrinkles and convolutions were traced elaborately by the silver-point of the moon-light, like the phosphorescence that outlines some goggling sea-monster.
“We have only the dragon left. A hundred times I’ve looked at that dragon and hated it and never understood it. Upright and high above that horror stood St. Michael or St. Margaret, subduing and conquering it; but it is the conqueror that has vanished. We have no notion of what it would be really like; we haven’t tried to imagine what image really stood there. We danced round it and thought of everything else except that. There burned in this court a great bonfire of visionary passion which in the spirit could be seen for miles and men lived in the warmth of it; the positive passion and possession, the thing worth having in itself. But now the very best of them are negative; attacking the absence of it in the world. They fight for truth where it isn’t. They fight for honour where it isn’t. They are a thousand times right; but it ends in truth and honour fighting each other, as poor Jack and Michael fought. We haven’t any sense or any place where these virtues are happy, where these virtues are simply themselves. I love Jack and Jack loves justice; but he loves justice where it isn’t. There ought to be a way of loving it where it is.”
“And where is that, I wonder?” said Rosamund in a low voice.
“How should we know,” cried Olive, “who have driven away the men who knew?”
A deep chasm of silence opened between them; and at last Rosamund said in her simple way; “I am very stupid. I shall have to try to think about what you mean. I’m sure you won’t mind if we don’t talk any more now.”
Olive went back slowly across the green courts and out of the shadow of the grey walls and found John Braintree waiting for her. They went away together, but were rather silent for the first part of the walk; then Olive said suddenly; “What a strange story all this is . . . I mean ever since I started poor Monkey running after red paint. What a rage I was in with you and your red tie; and yet in a queer sort of way it turns out to have been the same sort of red. I didn’t know it and you didn’t know it; and yet it was you who were working back blindly for the colour that I was after, like a child after a sunset cloud. It was you who were really trying to avenge my father’s friend.”
“I should have tried to get him his rights, I hope,” replied Braintree.
“Oh you are always so rabid about rights,” she said laughing with a faint impatience. “And poor Rosamund . . . you must admit you do talk a terrible lot about rights. Are you quite sure about them?”
“I hope to do a terrible lot about them before I’ve done,” replied the implacable politician.
“But do you,” she asked, “think anybody has really a right to be so happy?”
He laughed shortly and they went out along the grey road toward Milldyke.
CHAPTER XIX
THE RETURN OF DON QUIXOTE
Someday perhaps the story will be told of the adventures of the new Don Quixote and the new Sancho Panza, as they wandered about the winding roads of England. From the standpoint of the cold and satiric populace the story was rather that of the progress of the hansom cab, through scenes where hansom cabs very rarely figure. It was perhaps an unprecedented progress through forest glades and across desolate uplands; and as a method of travel chosen by a knight and his squire new even in the annals of chivalry. But some riotously romantic chronicler may yet give some account of how they attempted in various ways to use the vehicle for the defence and consolation of the oppressed. Of how they gave lifts to tramps and rides to children; of how they turned the cab into a coffee stall at Reading and into a tent on Salisbury Plain. Of how the cab figured as a bathing-machine in the dreadful affair at Worthing. Of how it was regarded by simple Calvinists of the Border as a perambulating pulpit, with a place below for the Precentor to sing and a place above for the minister to preach, which Mr. Douglas Murrel proceeded to do with great unction and edification. Of how Mr. Douglas Murrel organised a series of historical lectures by Mr. Herne from the top of the cab, and seconded them with comments and explanations, making the lecturing tour quite a financial success by methods perhaps not invariably respectful to the lecturer. But though there may have been moments when the squire fell short of a complete seriousness, it is probable on the whole that they did a great deal of good. They got into trouble with the police, in itself almost a sign of sanctity; they fought a number of people in private life, but mostly people who badly wanted fighting. And Herne at least was completely convinced of the serious social utility of this line of attack. A sadder and conceivably even a wiser man, he had many long talks with his friend, in which he never ceased to elaborate the Defence of Don Quixote and the necessity of his real return. One was especially memorable: which took place as they sat under a hedge in the high lanes of Sussex.