CHAPTER XLVI

When Charles came over in the morning, Robert made a pretence of discussing the budget with his a.s.sociates. It was hardly more than a pretence. Figures had palled upon him and he dragged himself each day to his work by force of will.

The city offices he ceased to visit. Every matter in which his judgment was asked or upon which his decision was needed was brought to The Towers. His horses were left to fret in the stables and he walked, usually alone, among the villa hills.

Hamilton, even when he felt he could not penetrate the loneliness of Kimberly's moods, came out regularly and Kimberly made him to know he was welcome. "It isn't that I want to be alone," he said one night in apology to the surgeon. "The only subjects that interest me condemn me to loneliness. Charles asked me to meet a Chicago friend of his last night--and he talked books to me and pictures! How can I talk pictures and books? McCrea brought out one of our Western directors the other day," as Kimberly continued his chin went down to where it sank when matters seemed hopeless, "and he talked railroads!"

"Go back to your books," urged Hamilton.

"Books are only the sham battles of life."

"Will you forego the recreation of the intellect?"

"Ah! The intellect. We train it to bring us everything the heart can wish. And when our fairy responds with its gifts the appet.i.te to enjoy them is gone. Hamilton, I am facing an insupportable question--what shall I do with myself? Shall I stop or go on? And if I go on, how?

This is why I am always alone."

"You overlook the simplest solution. Take up life again; your difficulties will disappear."

"What life? The one behind me? I have been over that ground. I should start out very well--with commendable resolutions to let a memory guide me. And I should end--in the old way. I tell you I will never do it.

There is a short cut to the end of that road--one I would rather take at the beginning. I loathe the thought of what lies behind me; I know the bitterness of the flesh." His hands were stretched upon the table and he clenched them slowly as he drew them up with his words, "I never will embrace or endure it again."

"Yet, for the average man," he went on, "only two roads lie open--Christianity or sensuality--and I am just the average man. I cannot calmly turn back to what I was before I knew her. She changed me. I am different. Christians, you know," his voice dropped as if he were musing, "have a curious notion that baptism fixes an indelible mark on the soul. If that is so, Alice was my baptism."

"Then your choice is already made, Robert."

"Why do you say that? When I choose I shall no longer be here. What I resent is being forced to choose. I hate to bow to law. My life has been one long contempt for it. I have set myself outside every law that ever interfered with my desires or ambitions. I have scorned law and ignored it--and I am punished. What can a man do against death?"

"Even so, there is nothing appalling in Christianity. Merely choose the form best adapted to your individual needs."

"What would you have me do? Fill myself with sounding words and echoing phrases? I am doing better than that where I am. There is only one essential form of Christianity--you know what it is. I tell you I never will bow to a law that is not made for every man, rich or poor, cultured or crude, ignorant or learned. I never will take up the husks of a 'law adapted to individual needs.' That is merely making my own law over again, and I am leaving that. I am sick of exploiting myself. I despise a law that exploits the individual. I despise men in religious thought that exploit themselves and their own doctrines. I need wholly another discipline and I shall never bring myself to embrace it."

"You are closer to it than you think. Yet, for my part, I hate to see you lose your individuality--to let some one else do your thinking for you."

"A part of my individuality I should be gainer for losing. A part of it I wish to G.o.d some one had robbed me of long ago. But I hate to see you, Hamilton, deceive yourself with phrases. 'Let some one else do your thinking for you,'" Kimberly echoed, looking contemptuously away. "If empty words like that were all!"

"You are going a good way, Robert," said the surgeon, dryly.

"I wish I might go far."

"Parting company with a good many serious minds--not to say brilliant ones."

"What has their brilliancy ever done for me? I am tired of this rubbish of writing and words. Francis was worth libraries. I esteem what he did with his life more than I do the written words of ten thousand. He fought the real battle."

"Did he win?"

Kimberly's hand shot out. "If I knew! If I knew," he repeated doggedly. And then more slowly. "If I knew--I would follow him."

CHAPTER XLVII

Kimberly no longer concealed from his family the trend of his thinking nor that which was to them its serious import. Dolly came to him in consternation. "My dear brother!" she wept, sitting down beside him.

His arm encircled her. "Dolly, there is absolutely nothing to cry about."

"Oh, there is; there is everything. How can you do it, Robert? You are turning your back on all modern thought."

"But 'modern thought,' Dolly, has nothing sacred about it. It is merely present-day thought and, as such, no better than any other day thought.

Every preposterous thought ever expressed was modern when it first reached expression. The difficulty is that all such 'modern' thought delights in reversing itself. It was one thing yesterday and is wholly another to-day; all that can with certainty be predicated of it is, that to-morrow it will be something quite else. Present day modern thought holds that what a man believes is of no moment--what he does is everything. Four hundred years ago 'modern' thought announced that what a man did was of no moment, what he believed was everything. Which was right?"

"Well, which was right?" demanded Dolly, petulantly. "You seem to be doing the sermonizing."

"If you ask me, I should say neither. I should say that what a man believes is vital and what he does is vital as well. I know--if my experience has taught me anything--that what men do will be to a material degree modified by what they believe. It is not I who am sermonizing, Dolly. Francis often expressed these thoughts. I have only weighed them--now they weigh me."

"I don't care what you call it. Arthur says it is pure mediaevalism."

"Tell Arthur, 'mediaevalism' is precisely what I am leaving. I am casting off the tatters of mediaeval 'modern' thought. I am discarding the rags of paganism to which the modern thought of the sixteenth century has reduced my generation and am returning to the most primitive of all religious precepts--authority. I am leaving the stony deserts of agnosticism which 'modern' thought four hundred years ago pointed out as the promised land and I am returning to the path trodden by St.

Augustine. Surely, Dolly, in this there is nothing appalling for any one unless it is for the man that has it to do."

Yet Kimberly deferred a step against which every inclination in his nature fought. It was only a persistent impulse, one that refused to be wholly smothered, that held him to it. He knew that the step must be taken or he must do worse, and the alternative, long pondered, was a repellent one.

Indeed, the alternative of ignoring a deepening conviction meant, he realized, that he must part with his self-respect. He went so far as seriously to ask himself whether he could not face putting this away; whether it was not, after all, a fanciful thing that he might do better without. He considered that many men manage to get on very well in this world without the scruple of self-respect.

But honesty with himself had been too long the code of his life to allow him to evade an unanswered question and he forced himself gradually to the point of returning to the archbishop. One night he stood again, by appointment, in his presence.

"I am at fault in not having written you," Kimberly said simply. "It was kind of you to remember me in my sorrow last summer. Through some indecision I failed to write."

"I understand perfectly. Indeed, you had no need to write," returned the archbishop. "Somehow I have felt I should see you again."

"The knot was cruelly cut."

The archbishop paused. "I have thought of it all very often since that day on the hill," he said. "'Suppose,' I have asked myself, 'he had been taken instead. It would have been easier for him. But could he really wish it? Could he, knowing what she once had suffered, wish that she be left without him to the mercies of this world?'" The archbishop shook his head. "I think not. I think if one were to be taken, you could not wish it had been you. That would have been not better, but worse."

"But she would not have been responsible for my death. I am for hers."

"Of that you cannot be certain. What went before your coming into her life may have been much more responsible."

"I am responsible for another death--my own nephew, you know, committed suicide. And I would, before this, have ended my mistakes and failures," his voice rose in spite of his suppression "--put myself beyond the possibility of more--but that she believed what you believe, that Christ is the Son of G.o.d."

The words seemed wrung from him. "It is this that has driven me to you.

I am sickened of strife and success--the life of the senses. It is Dead Sea fruit and I have tasted its bitterness. If I can do nothing to repair what I have already done, then I am better done with life."

"And do not you, too, believe that Christ is the Son of G.o.d?"

"I do not know what I believe--I believe nothing. Convince me that He was the Son of G.o.d and I will kneel to him in the dust."