CHAPTER VI

He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths of Asia, spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of superlative sanctity; but what was present to him everywhere was that for a man who had known what he had known the world was vulgar and vain.  The state of mind in which he had lived for so many years shone out to him, in reflexion, as a light that coloured and refined, a light beside which the glow of the East was garish cheap and thin.  The terrible truth was that he had lost—­with everything else—­a distinction as well the things he saw couldn’t help being common when he had become common to look at them.  He was simply now one of them himself—­he was in the dust, without a peg for the sense of difference; and there were hours when, before the temples of gods and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for nobleness of association to the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb.  That had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one witness of a past glory.  It was all that was left to him for proof or pride, yet the past glories of Pharaohs were nothing to him as he thought of it.  Small wonder then that he came back to it on the morrow of his return.  He was drawn there this time as irresistibly as the other, yet with a confidence, almost, that was doubtless the effect of the many months that had elapsed.  He had lived, in spite of himself, into his change of feeling, and in wandering over the earth had wandered, as might be said, from the circumference to the centre of his desert.  He had settled to his safety and accepted perforce his extinction; figuring to himself, with some colour, in the likeness of certain little old men he remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagre and wizened as they might look, it was related that they had in their time fought twenty duels or been loved by ten princesses.  They indeed had been wondrous for others while he was but wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the cause of his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might put it, into his own presence.  That had quickened his steps and checked his delay.  If his visit was prompt it was because he had been separated so long from the part of himself that alone he now valued.

It’s accordingly not false to say that he reached his goal with a certain elation and stood there again with a certain assurance.  The creature beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely now, the place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression.  It met him in mildness—­not, as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in things that have closely belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselves to the connexion.  The plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tended flowers affected him so as belonging to him that he resembled for the hour a contented landlord reviewing