The Far Horizon | Page 3

the hospitalities of
Cedar Lodge. He had dined here, upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the
German- Swiss valet, had just finished clearing the table and departed.
Usually under such circumstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite
book from the carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small
library; and, reading again that which he had often read before, would
have found therein the satisfaction of friendship, along with the
soothing influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's
_Rome_--a handsome early edition in many volumes--_The Travels of
Anacharsis_, Evelyn's _Diary_, Napier's _Peninsular War_, John Stuart
Mill's _Logic_, Byron's _Poems_, nor those of Calderon, nor of that
so-called "prodigy of nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and
immortal Don Quixote himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts,
his own life, filled his whole horizon, leaving no space for the thoughts
or lives of others. He found himself a prey to a certain mental
incoherence, a bewildering activity of vision. More than once before in
the course of his laborious, monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous
life had this same thing happened to him--the tides of the obvious and
accustomed suddenly receding and leaving him stranded, as on some
barren sand-bank, uncertain whether the ship of his individual fate
would lie there wind-swept and sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out
and planks parted, disclosing the ribs of her in unsightly nakedness, or
whether the kindly tide, rising, would float her off into blue water and
she would sail hopefully once again.
It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these other
happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the ship
of his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left school.
Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in Holland Street,
Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the world and to
obtain, it had dawned on him that there was something strange,
unhappy, and not as it was wont to be with that, to him, most beautiful

and beloved of women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy against
which his young loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the inherent
pieties of his Latin and Celtic blood, had none of that contemptuous
superiority in regard of his near relations so common to male creatures
of the Protestant persuasion and Anglo-Saxon race. He took his parents
quite seriously; it never having occurred to him that fathers and
mothers are given us merely for purposes of discipline, or as helot-like
examples of what to avoid. He was simple-minded enough indeed to
regard them as sacred, altogether beyond the bounds of legitimate
criticism--and this, as destiny would have it, with intimate and life-long
results.
Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried
exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the
fierce and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother
lived-- namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the
house in the Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking stairways,
its high wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and scampered--its
clinging odour of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings, and uneven
floors. At the back of it was a narrow strip of garden, glorious for one
brief week in early summer, with the gold of a big laburnum; and
fragrant later thanks to faithful effort on the part of the white jasmine
clothing its enclosing walls. In fair weather the morning sun lay warm
there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of
the adjacent housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc
cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a
rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted
column bearing a stone basin--in which, after rain, sparrows disported
themselves with much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings--the
garden was, to little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He
peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to
his passing humour. Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary
child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its
inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is
unquenched by vulgar comment.
His father, grave and preoccupied, whose arrivals after long periods of

absence had in them an effect of secrecy and haste, was to the small
boy a being, august, but remote. During his brief sojourns at home the
quiet house awoke to greater fulness of life, with much coming and
going of other grave personages, strange of dress, and with a certain
effect of hardly restrained violence in their aspect. A spirit of fear
seemed to enter with them, demanding an unnatural darkening of
windows and closing of doors. Before Dominic they were of few