Kingston might, in saner circumstances, have smiled at denunciations so fantastic. But the little old man, so quiet yet so earnest, had a strange inexplicable dominance. He might not be believed, but he must at any rate be respected. In all he said there was a deep passion of earnestness, wistful and solemn, that gave the wizened little figure in the outrageous European clothes something of the prophet’s tragic grandeur. Now, his mission being discharged, the visitor arose to start once more on his way. Kingston, in the feeling that he had no real part in this earthly world, could make no effort to detain him. Nor would any effort have succeeded. As he had come, abruptly, unannounced, so he would go, abruptly, without mitigating gradation of farewells.
‘Very far apart are we two,’ he said, with a whimsical smile of his dried lips. ‘We speak in different languages, across a barrier of worlds. Yet one day we shall draw together, and our hearts be made kin again. And now I must go. Say good-bye for me to your wife. Out of our passions we make whips for our own backs, and there are other passions besides that of love for others. She too, your wife, must pay the penalty that she has appointed for herself, and out of her fancied strength shall come the great weakness that shall impose on her, and you, and all, that punishment which wisdom would have helped you to avoid. None is good but he who does not know it.’
Kingston was not paying close attention. His mind was fixed on the hope thus made so definite, if perilous, of reunion with Isabel. He foresaw a second meeting, a second recognition, even though it might be one-sided. In the rapture of his hope he laughed at risks, and would face all the vague punishments foretold by the old man without a moment’s fear or hesitation, for the chance of setting eyes again, for however short a time, on the love that he had lost. In that hour the fires of youth flamed high in his heart, and he cared nothing what bitter waters might quench them once more in the end. In a dream he escorted the old man to the door, and watched him pass gently away into the void from which he had so suddenly emerged. Into the crowd of moving figures in the street the old man passed, and melted like a phantom. It was with almost the feeling of having been asleep and strangely dreamed that Kingston went back to the drawing-room, and found himself once more in the prosaic calm world where Gundred sat in a perpetual atmosphere of duty and terrestrial activities. When she returned to her husband with many questions as to the Bishop’s message, plans, and present whereabouts, Kingston could almost have believed that the last hour had been wiped out of his life, or, rather, had never formed a part of it. Her arrival made the whole episode so remote and so fantastic to look back upon that he could scarcely feel that it had really occurred at all. She was so practical, so busy, so matter-of-fact; visions and abstractions could not breathe in her neighbourhood, grew faint, vague, unreal, until the earthly life in which she moved appeared to be the only one with which sensible people could ever have to reckon. She had the not uncommon gift of making the invisible seem non-existent.