CHAPTER IX

“And how are you, old chap?  I am delighted to see you.”

“I’m equally glad to see you.  You have made alterations in the place ...  I came down from London with a lot of Johnnies and tarts—­Kitty Carew, Laura Stanley and her sister.  I got Dicky the driver to turn in here.  You were playing the Dies Irae.  I never was more impressed in my life.  You should have seen the coach beneath the great window ...  St. George overcoming the Johnnies ... the tumult of the organ ... and I couldn’t stand singing ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes.’  I sickened of them—­the whole thing—­and I felt I must see you.”

“And are they outside?”

“No; they have gone off.”

Relieved of fear of intrusion, John laughed loudly, and commented humorously on the spectacle of the Brighton coach filled with revellers drawn up beneath his window.  Then, to discuss the window—­the quality of the glass—­he turned out the lamps; the hall filled with the legend, and their hearts full of it, and delighting in the sensation of each other, they walked up and down the echoing hall.  John remembered a certain fugue by Bach, and motioning to the page to blow, he seated himself at the key-board.  The celestial shield and crest still remained in little colour.  Mike saw John’s hands moving over the key-board, and his soul went out in worship of that soul, divided from the world’s pleasure, self-sufficing, alone; seeking God only in his home of organ fugue and legended pane.  He understood the nobleness and purity which was now about him—­it seemed impossible to him to return to Kitty.

Swift and complete reaction had come upon him, and choked with the moral sulphur of the last twenty-four hours, he craved the breath of purity.  He must talk of Plato’s Republic, of Wagner’s operas, of Schopenhauer; even Lily was not now so imperative as these; and next day, after lunch, when the question of his departure was alluded to, Mike felt it was impossible to leave John; but persecuted with scruples of disloyalty to Kitty, he resisted his friend’s invitation to stay.  He urged he had no clothes.  John offered to send the coachman into Brighton for what he wanted.

“But perhaps you have no money,” John said, inadvertently, and a look of apprehension passed into his face.

“Oh, I have plenty of money—­’tisn’t that.  I haven’t told you that a friend of mine, a lady, has left me nearly five thousand a year.  I don’t think you ever saw her—­Lady Seeley.”

John burst into uncontrollable laughter.  “That is the best thing I ever heard in all my life.  I don’t think I ever heard anything that amused me more.  The grotesqueness of the whole thing.”  Seeing that Mike was annoyed he hastened to explain his mirth.  “The inexplicableness of human action always amuses me; the inexplicable is romance, at least that is the only way I can understand romance.  When you reduce life to a logical sequence you destroy all poetry, and, I think, all reality.  We do things constantly, and no one can say why we do them.  Frederick the Great coming in, after reviewing his troops, to play the flute, that to me is intensely romantic.  A lady, whom you probably treated exceedingly badly, leaving you her property, that too is, to me.”