The Far Horizon | Page 6

shudder of
personal fear--whom she never sends forth at all; but holds close in
bondage all their lives long, enslaved to her countless and tyrant
activities by their own poverty, or by their fellow-creatures' misfortune,
cruelties, and sins. Was it thus she was going to deal with him,
Dominic Iglesias? Was he to be among the great city's bondmen
through the coming years, better acquainted with the very earthly light
which walks her streets by night, than with the heavenly light which
gladdens the sweet face of day in the open country and upon the open
sea? And for a moment the boy's heart rebelled, hungry for pleasure,
hungry for wide experience, hungry even for knowledge of those
revolutionary intrigues which, as he was beginning to understand, had
surrounded his childhood, and, as he was beginning to fear, had cost his
mother her reason and his father both liberty and life. Thus did the ship
of poor Dominic's fate appear to be stranded or ever it had fairly set sail
at all.
Meanwhile, if London claimed him, she did so in very cynical fashion,
mocking his willingness to labour, refusing to feed him even while she
refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him--his youth,
his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving
definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present
whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands
and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic
colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech--all these marked him as
unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British
employer of labour--of whatever sort--has, it must be conceded, but
little use. He is half afraid, half contemptuous of it, instinctively

disliking anything more alert and alive than his own most stolid self.
But while men, distrusting the distinctness of his personality and his
good looks, refused to give Dominic work, women, relishing them,
were only too ready to give him enjoyment--of a kind. The boy, in
those solitary wanderings, ran the gauntlet of many temptations; and
was presented--did he care to accept it--with the freedom of the city on
very liberal lines. Happily, inherent cleanliness of nature saved him
from much; and reverent shame at the thought of entering the hushed
and silent house where his mother lived-- spotless, amid pathetic
memories and delicate dreams--with the soil of licence upon him, saved
him from more. Crime might have come close to him in his childhood,
but vice never; and the influences of vice are far more insidious, and
consequently more damaging, than those of crime.
Still, one way and another, the boy came very near touching the
confines of despair. Then the tide rose and the stranded ship of his fate
began to lift a little. By means of a series of accidents--the illness of his
former school-fellow, the already mentioned George Lovegrove, whose
post he offered temporarily to fill--he drifted into connection with the
banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking. There his
knowledge of modern languages, his industry, and a certain discreet
aloofness commended him to his superiors. A minor clerkship fell
vacant; it was offered to him. And from thenceforth, for Dominic
Iglesias, the monotony of fixed routine and steady labour, until the day
when, as a man of past fifty, restless and somewhat distrustful both of
the present and the future, he watched the dying of the sullen sunset
over Trimmer's Green from the windows of the first-floor sitting-room
of Cedar Lodge.

CHAPTER II
That which had in point of fact happened was not, as Iglesias felt,
without a pretty sharp edge of irony. For to-day, London, so long his
task-mistress and gaoler, had assumed a new attitude towards him.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, she had cast him off, given him his freedom.
It was amazing, a thing to take your breath away for the moment. And

agitated and hurt--for his pride unquestionably had suffered in the
process--Iglesias asked himself what in the world he should do with
this gift of freedom, what he should do, indeed, with that which
remained to him of life?
It had come about thus. Seeking an interview that morning with Sir
Abel Barking, in the latter's private room at the bank, he had made
certain statements regarding his own health in justification of a request
for some weeks' rest and holiday now, rather than later, in September,
when his yearly vacation would fall due.
"So you find yourself unequal to dealing satisfactorily with the
increasing intricacy of our financial operations, become confused by
the multiplicity of detail, suffer from pains in the head?" Sir Abel had
commented, with a certain largeness of manner. "I own, my good friend,
I was not wholly unprepared for this announcement."
"My work has not so