Primeval Force--the thin-faced, narrow-chested, slightly bald clergyman of the Church of England was thinking--never loses its way, or fails to sweep a path before it.The sun rises and sets, the seasons come and go, Primeval Force is of them, and as unchangeable.Much of it stood before him embodied in this strongly sentient thing.In this way the Reverend Lewis found his thoughts leading him, and he--being moved to the depths of a fine soul--felt them profoundly interesting, and even sustaining.
He sat in a high-backed chair, holding its arms with long thin hands, and looking for some time at James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre.He said, at last, in a sane level voice:
"Lord Tenham is not the last Mount Dunstan."After which the stillness remained unbroken again for some minutes.Saltyre did not move or make any response, and, when he left his place at the window, he took up a book, and they spoke of other things.
When the fourteenth Earl died in Paris, and his younger son succeeded, there came a time when the two companions sat together in the library again.It was the evening of a long day spent in discouraging hard work.In the morning they had ridden side by side over the estate, in the afternoon they had sat and pored over accounts, leases, maps, plans.By nightfall both were fagged and neither in sanguine mood.
Mount Dunstan had sat silent for some time.The pair often sat silent.This pause was ended by the young man's rising and standing up, stretching his limbs.
"It was a queer thing you said to me in this room a few years ago," he said."It has just come back to me."Singularly enough--or perhaps naturally enough--it had also just arisen again from the depths of Penzance's subconsciousness.
"Yes," he answered, "I remember.To-night it suggests premonition.Your brother was not the last Mount Dunstan.""In one sense he never was Mount Dunstan at all,"answered the other man.Then he suddenly threw out his arms in a gesture whose whole significance it would have been difficult to describe.There was a kind of passion in it."Iam the last Mount Dunstan," he harshly laughed."Moi qui vous parle! The last."Penzance's eyes resting on him took upon themselves the far-seeing look of a man who watches the world of life without living in it.He presently shook his head.
"No," he said."I don't see that.No--not the last.
Believe me.
And singularly, in truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and gazed at him without speaking.The eyes of each rested in the eyes of the other.And, as had happened before, they followed the subject no further.From that moment it dropped.
Only Penzance had known of his reasons for going to America.Even the family solicitors, gravely holding interviews with him and restraining expression of their absolute disapproval of such employment of his inadequate resources, knew no more than that this Mount Dunstan, instead of wasting his beggarly income at Cairo, or Monte Carlo, or in Paris as the last one had done, prefers to waste it in newer places.
The head of the firm, when he bids him good-morning and leaves him alone, merely shrugs his shoulders and returns to his letter writing with the corners of his elderly mouth hard set.
Penzance saw him off--and met him upon his return.Inthe library they sat and talked it over, and, having done so, closed the book of the episode.
.....
He sat at the table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness of the landscape, but his thought elsewhere.It wandered over the years already lived through, wandering backwards even to the days when existence, opening before the child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.
When the door opened and Penzance was ushered in by a servant, his face wore the look his friend would have been rejoiced to see swept away to return no more.
Then let us take our old accustomed seat and begin some casual talk, which will draw him out of the shadows, and make him forget such things as it is not good to remember.That is what we have done many times in the past, and may find it well to do many a time again.
He begins with talk of the village and the country-side.
Village stories are often quaint, and stories of the country-side are sometimes--not always--interesting.Tom Benson's wife has presented him with triplets, and there is great excitement in the village, as to the steps to be taken to secure the three guineas given by the Queen as a reward for this feat.Old Benny Bates has announced his intention of taking a fifth wife at the age of ninety, and is indignant that it has been suggested that the parochial authorities in charge of the "Union," in which he must inevitably shortly take refuge, may interfere with his rights as a citizen.The Reverend Lewis has been to talk seriously with him, and finds him at once irate and obdurate.