in love with her indeed.’ He got up from the piano, and paced quickly and feverishly up and down the room.
‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘if only I weren’t bound down so by this unprofitable trade of parson! A curate on eighty pounds a year, and a few pupils! The presumptuousness of the man in venturing to think of falling in love, as if he were actually one of the beneficed clergy! What are deacons coming to, I wonder! And yet, hath not a deacon eyes; hath not a deacon hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? And if you show us a little Miss Butterfly, beautiful to the finger-ends, do we not fall in love with her at least as unaffectedly as if we were canons residentiary or rural deans? Fancy little Miss Butterfly a rural deaness! the notion’s too ridiculous. Fly away, little Miss Butterfly; fly away, sweet little frolicsome, laughsome creature. I won’t try to tie you down to a man in a black clerical coat with a very distant hypothetical reversionary prospect of a dull and dingy country parsonage. Flit elsewhere, little Miss Butterfly, flit elsewhere, and find yourself a gayer, gaudier-coloured mate!’
He sat down again, and strummed a few more bars of his half-composed, half-extemporised melody. Then he leant back on the music-stool, and said gently to himself once more: ‘Still, if it were possible, how happy I should try to make her! Bright little Miss Butterfly, I would try never to let a cold cloud pass chillily over your sunshiny head! I would live for you, and work for you, and write songs for your sake, all full of you, you, you, and so all full of life and grace and thrilling music. What’s my life good for, to me or to the world? “A clergyman’s life is such a useful one,” that amiable old conventionality gurgled out this morning; what’s the good of mine, as it stands now, to its owner or to anybody else, I should like to know, except the dear old Progenitor? A mere bit of cracked blue china, a fanciful air from a comic opera, masquerading in black and white as a piece of sacred music! What good am I to anyone on earth but the Progenitor (God bless him!), and when he’s gone, dear old fellow, what on earth shall I have left to live for. A selfish blank, that’s all. But with HER, ah, how different! With her to live for and to cherish, with an object to set before oneself as worth one’s consideration, what mightn’t I do at last? Make her happy—after all, that’s the great thing. Make her fond of my music, that music that floats and evades me now, but would harden into scores as if by magic with her to help one to spell it out—I know it would, at last, I know it would. Ah, well, perhaps some day I may be able; perhaps some day the dream will realise itself; till then, work, work, work; let me try to work towards making it possible, a living or a livelihood, no matter which. But not a breath of it to you meanwhile, Miss Butterfly; flit about freely and joyously while you may; I would not spoil your untrammelled flight for worlds by trying to tether it too soon around the fixed centre of my own poor doubtful diaconal destinies.’
At the same moment while Arthur Berkeley was thus garrulously conversing with his heated fancy, Harry and Edie Oswald were strolling lazily down the High, to Edie’s lodgings.
‘Well, what do you think now of Berkeley and Le Breton, Edie?’ asked her brother. ‘Which of them do you like the best?’
‘I like them both immensely, Harry; I really can’t choose between them. When Mr. Berkeley plays, he almost makes me fall in love with him; and when Mr. Le Breton talks, he almost makes me transfer my affections to him instead … But Mr. Berkeley plays divinely … And Mr. Le Breton talks beautifully … You know, I’ve never seen such clever men before—except you, of course, Harry dear, for you’re cleverer and nicer than anybody. Oh, do let me look at those lovely silks over there?’ And she danced across the road before he could answer her, like a tripping sylph in a painter’s dreamland.
‘Mr. Le Breton’s very nice,’ she went on, after she had duly examined and classified the silks, ‘but I don’t exactly understand what it is he’s got on his conscience.’
‘Nothing whatsoever, except the fact of his own existence,’ Harry answered with a laugh. ‘He has conscientious scruples against the existence of idle people in the community—do-nothings and eat-alls—and therefore he has conscientious scruples against himself for not immediately committing suicide. I believe, if he did exactly what he thought was abstractly right, he’d go away and cut his own throat incontinently for an unprofitable, unproductive, useless citizen.’
‘Oh, dear, I hope he’ll do nothing of the sort,’ cried Edie hastily. ‘I think I shall really ask him not to for my sake, if not for anybody else’s.’
‘He’d be very much flattered indeed by your interposition on his behalf, no doubt, Popsy; but I’m afraid it wouldn’t produce much effect upon his ultimate decision.’
‘Tell me, Harry, is Mr. Berkeley High Church?’
‘Oh dear no, I shouldn’t say so. I don’t suppose he ever gave the subject a single moment’s consideration.’
‘But St. Fredegond’s is very High Church, I’m told.’
‘Ah, yes; but Berkeley’s curate of St. Fredegond’s, not in virtue of his theology—I never heard he’d got any to speak of—but in virtue of his musical talents. He went into the Church, I suppose, on purely aesthetic grounds. He liked a musical service, and it seemed natural to him to take part in one, just as it seemed natural to a mediaeval Italian with artistic tendencies to paint Madonnas and St. Sebastians. There’s nothing more in his clerical coat than that, I fancy, Edie. He probably never thought twice about it on theological grounds.’
‘Oh, but that’s very wrong of him, Harry. I don’t mean having no particular theological beliefs, of course; one expects that nowadays; but going into the Church without them.’
‘Well, you see, Edie, you mustn’t judge Berkeley in quite the same way as you’d judge other people. In his mind, the aesthetic side is always uppermost; the logical side is comparatively in abeyance. Questions of creed, questions of philosophical belief, questions of science don’t interest him at all; he looks at all of them from the point of view of the impression alone. What he sees in the Church is not a body of dogmas, like the High Churchmen, nor a set of opinions, like the Low Churchmen, but a close corporation of educated and cultivated gentlemen, charged with the duty of caring for a number of beautiful mediaeval architectural monuments, and of carrying on a set of grand and impressive musical or oral services. To him, a cathedral is a magnificent historical heritage; a sermon is a sort of ingenious literary exercise; and a hymn is a capital vehicle for very solemn emotional music. That’s all; and we can hardly blame him for not seeing these things as we should see them.’
‘Well, Harry, I don’t know. I like them both immensely. Mr. Berkeley’s very nice, but perhaps I like Mr. Le Breton the best of the two.’
CHAPTER V. — ASKELON VILLA, GATH.
Number, 28, Epsilon Terrace, Bayswater, was one of the very smallest houses that a person with any pretensions to move in that Society which habitually spells itself with a capital initial could ever possibly have dreamt of condescending to inhabit. Indeed, if Dame Eleanor, relict of the late Sir Owen Le Breton, Knight, had consulted merely the length of her purse and the interests of her personal comfort, she would doubtless have found for the same rental a far more convenient and roomy cottage in Upper Clapton or Stoke Newington. But Lady Le Breton was a thoroughly and conscientiously religious woman, who in all things consulted first and foremost the esoteric interests of her ingrained creed. It was a prime article of this cherished social faith that nobody with any shadow of personal self-respect could endure to live under any other postal letter than W. or S.W. Better not to be at all than to drag out a miserable existence in the painful obscurity of N. or S.E. Happily for people situated like Lady Le Breton, the metropolitan house-contractor (it would be gross flattery to describe him as a builder) has divined, with his usual practical sagacity, the necessity for supplying this felt want for eligible family residences at once comparatively cheap and relatively fashionable. By