The Far Horizon | Page 4

words;
but became eloquent enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears
testified when he was banished from their rather electric presence to the
solitude of the nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of
mystery, of large issues, of things at once strong and hidden,
impenetrable to his understanding and concerning which no questions
might be asked, encircled Dominic's childhood and passed into the very
fabric of his thought. While through it all his mother moved, to him
tender and wholly exquisite, but with the reticence of some deep-seated
enthusiasm silently cherished, some far-reaching alarm silently endured,
always upon her. And this resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and
responsibility which inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober
beyond his years, tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and
pitching even his laughter in a minor key.
Only many years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty
to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did
Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the
public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his
childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble
nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply
involved in revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type--a victim
of that false passion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest
desire for the welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against all
forms of authority. His self-confidence was colossal; all rule being
abominable to him--save his own--all rulers hideous, save himself. The
anarchist, rightly understood, is merely the autocrat, the tyrant, turned
inside out. And this man, as Dominic gathered from the perusal of
those old letters, to whom the end so justified the means that
red-handed crime took on the fair colours of virtue, his mother had
loved, even while she feared him, with all the faithfulness and pure

passion of her Irish blood. Pathetic combination, the patience and
resignation of the one ever striving to temper the flaming zeal of the
other, as though the spindrift of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the
dim sadness of far western coasts, should strive with relentless
fierceness of sunglare outpoured on some high-lying walled city of arid
central Spain! Mist is but a weak thing as against rock and fire; and
what his mother must have suffered in moral and spiritual conflict, let
alone all question of active dread, was to her son almost too cruel to
contemplate, although it explained and justified much.
In 1860, when Dominic was a schoolboy of fourteen, his father left
home on one of those sudden journeys the object and objective of
which were alike concealed. For about a year letters arrived at irregular
intervals, hailing from Paris, Naples, Prague, and finally Petersburg.
Then followed silence, broken only by rumours furtively conveyed by a
former associate, one Pascal Pelletier--an angel-faced, long-haired,
hysteric creature, inspired by an impassioned enthusiasm for infernal
machines and wholesale slaughter in theory, and, in practice, by a
gentle doglike devotion to Mrs. Iglesias and young Dominic. He would
arrive depressed and shadowy in the shadowy twilights. But, once in
the presence of the beings whom he loved, he became effervescent. His
belief was unlimited in the Head Centre, the Chief, in his demonic
power and fertility of resource. That any evil should befall him!--Pascal
snapped his thin fingers; while, with the inalienable optimism of the
born fanatic, he proceeded to state hopeful conjecture as established
fact, thereby doing homage to the spirit of delusion which so
conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost thought. But a spell of cold
weather in the winter of 1862 struck a little too shrewdly through
Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender- hearted subverter of
society to cough his life out, with all possible despatch, in the
third-floor back of a filthy lodging-house off Tottenham Court Road.
This was the end as far as information went, whether authentic or
apocryphal. But Dominic, his horizon still bounded by the world of
school, greedy of distinction both in learning and in games, away all
day and eagerly, if somewhat sleepily, busy over the preparation of
lessons at night, was very far from realising that. Poor voluble

kind-eyed Pascal he mourned with all his heart; yet the months of his
father's absence accumulated into years almost unnoticed. The same
thing had so often happened before; and then, at an unlooked-for
moment, the wanderer had returned. Moreover, the old habit of
obedience was still strong in him. It was understood that concerning his
father's occupations and movements no comment might be made, no
questions might be asked.
Meanwhile, the small house in Holland Street was ever more still, more
unfrequented. As he grew older Dominic became increasingly sensible