By the time that Horne Fisher had ended his telling of this story to Harold March they had come out into one of the public parks and taken a seat on a rise of ground overlooking wide green spaces under a blue and empty sky; and there was something incongruous in the words with which the narration ended.

“I have been in that room ever since,” said Horne Fisher.  “I am in it now.  I won the election, but I never went to the House.  My life has been a life in that little room on that lonely island.  Plenty of books and cigars and luxuries, plenty of knowledge and interest and information, but never a voice out of that tomb to reach the world outside.  I shall probably die there.”  And he smiled as he looked across the vast green park to the gray horizon.

VIII.  THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE

It was on the sunny veranda of a seaside hotel, overlooking a pattern of flower beds and a strip of blue sea, that Horne Fisher and Harold March had their final explanation, which might be called an explosion.

Harold March had come to the little table and sat down at it with a subdued excitement smoldering in his somewhat cloudy and dreamy blue eyes.  In the newspapers which he tossed from him on to the table there was enough to explain some if not all of his emotion.  Public affairs in every department had reached a crisis.  The government which had stood so long that men were used to it, as they are used to a hereditary despotism, had begun to be accused of blunders and even of financial abuses.  Some said that the experiment of attempting to establish a peasantry in the west of England, on the lines of an early fancy of Horne Fisher’s, had resulted in nothing but dangerous quarrels with more industrial neighbors.  There had been particular complaints of the ill treatment of harmless foreigners, chiefly Asiatics, who happened to be employed in the new scientific works constructed on the coast.  Indeed, the new Power which had arisen in Siberia, backed by Japan and other powerful allies, was inclined to take the matter up in the interests of its exiled subjects; and there had been wild talk about ambassadors and ultimatums.  But something much more serious, in its personal interest for March himself, seemed to fill his meeting with his friend with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation.

Perhaps it increased his annoyance that there was a certain unusual liveliness about the usually languid figure of Fisher.  The ordinary image of him in March’s mind was that of a pallid and bald-browed gentleman, who seemed to be prematurely old as well as prematurely bald.  He was remembered as a man who expressed the opinions of a pessimist in the language of a lounger.  Even now March could not be certain whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade of sunshine, or that effect of clear colors and clean-cut outlines that is always visible on the parade of a marine resort, relieved against the blue dado of the sea.  But Fisher had a flower in his buttonhole, and his friend could have sworn he carried his cane with something almost like the swagger of a fighter.  With such clouds gathering over England, the pessimist seemed to be the only man who carried his own sunshine.