In that uninitiated observation of the great spectacle of English life upon which I have touched, it might be supposed that Newman passed a great many dull days.But the dullness of his days pleased him;his melancholy, which was settling into a secondary stage, like a healing wound, had in it a certain acrid, palatable sweetness.
He had company in his thoughts, and for the present he wanted no other.
He had no desire to make acquaintances, and he left untouched a couple of notes of introduction which had been sent him by Tom Tristram.
He thought a great deal of Madame de Cintre--sometimes with a dogged tranquillity which might have seemed, for a quarter of an hour at a time, a near neighbor to forgetfulness.He lived over again the happiest hours he had known--that silver chain of numbered days in which his afternoon visits, tending sensibly to the ideal result, had subtilized his good humor to a sort of spiritual intoxication.
He came back to reality, after such reveries, with a somewhat muffled shock;he had begun to feel the need of accepting the unchangeable.
At other times the reality became an infamy again and the unchangeable an imposture, and he gave himself up to his angry restlessness till he was weary.But on the whole he fell into a rather reflective mood.
Without in the least intending it or knowing it, he attempted to read the moral of his strange misadventure.He asked himself, in his quieter hours, whether perhaps, after all, he WAS more commercial than was pleasant.
We know that it was in obedience to a strong reaction against questions exclusively commercial that he had come out to pick up aesthetic entertainment in Europe; it may therefore be understood that he was able to conceive that a man might be too commercial.
He was very willing to grant it, but the concession, as to his own case, was not made with any very oppressive sense of shame.
If he had been too commercial, he was ready to forget it, for in being so he had done no man any wrong that might not be as easily forgotten.
He reflected with sober placidity that at least there were no monuments of his "meanness" scattered about the world.
If there was any reason in the nature of things why his connection with business should have cast a shadow upon a connection--even a connection broken--with a woman justly proud, he was willing to sponge it out of his life forever.The thing seemed a possibility;he could not feel it, doubtless, as keenly as some people, and it hardly seemed worth while to flap his wings very hard to rise to the idea;but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made.As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played a shadowy imagery.He had a fancy of carrying out his life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintre had been left to him--of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked.
In this, certainly, there was no sacrifice; but there was a pale, oblique ray of inspiration.It would be lonely entertainment--a good deal like a man talking to himself in the mirror for want of better company.
Yet the idea yielded Newman several half hours' dumb exaltation as he sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched, over the relics of an expensively poor dinner, in the undying English twilight.If, however, his commercial imagination was dead, he felt no contempt for the surviving actualities begotten by it.
He was glad he had been prosperous and had been a great man of business rather than a small one; he was extremely glad he was rich.
He felt no impulse to sell all he had and give to the poor, or to retire into meditative economy and asceticism.He was glad he was rich and tolerably young; it was possible to think too much about buying and selling, it was a gain to have a good slice of life left in which not to think about them.Come, what should he think about now?
Again and again Newman could think only of one thing; his thoughts always came back to it, and as they did so, with an emotional rush which seemed physically to express itself in a sudden upward choking, he leaned forward--the waiter having left the room--and, resting his arms on the table, buried his troubled face.
He remained in England till midsummer, and spent a month in the country, wandering about cathedrals, castles, and ruins.
Several times, taking a walk from his inn into meadows and parks, he stopped by a well-worn stile, looked across through the early evening at a gray church tower, with its dusky nimbus of thick-circling swallows, and remembered that this might have been part of the entertainment of his honeymoon.He had never been so much alone or indulged so little in accidental dialogue.
The period of recreation appointed by Mrs.Tristram had at last expired, and he asked himself what he should do now.
Mrs.Tristram had written to him, proposing to him that he should join her in the Pyrenees; but he was not in the humor to return to France.The simplest thing was to repair to Liverpool and embark on the first American steamer.
Newman made his way to the great seaport and secured his berth;and the night before sailing he sat in his room at the hotel, staring down, vacantly and wearily, at an open portmanteau.
A number of papers were lying upon it, which he had been meaning to look over; some of them might conveniently be destroyed.
But at last he shuffled them roughly together, and pushed them into a corner of the valise; they were business papers, and he was in no humor for sifting them.Then he drew forth his pocket-book and took out a paper of smaller size than those he had dismissed.He did not unfold it;he simply sat looking at the back of it.If he had momentarily entertained the idea of destroying it, the idea quickly expired.
