Richard Dowling - Under St Paul's - A Romance

'You have been about a good deal?' said he. 'Yes.' 'And seen many strange sights?' 'Well, yes.' 'The strangest of all is now here. You will scarcely believe me when I say I am eight-and-twenty years of age, and I have never been fifty miles from my native town in all my life until now.' 'God bless my soul!' The traveller sprang to his feet. 'God bless my soul! Sir, let us shake hands. We must be friends. My name is William Nevill. What is yours?' 'Mine is George Osborne.' 'My dear Osborne, this is the happiest moment of my life. Some Roman swell once offered a beautiful bound edition of the poets to anyone who would invent a new pleasure. By living your twenty-eight years within your fifty-mile radius, and then meeting me, you have invented a new pleasure with a vengeance. How do you feel?' 'I feel quite well, thank you.' 'I am astonished at that. How a fellow can feel well who has been all his life tethered with a fifty-mile rope to the family house-tree, I cannot understand. Bless my soul! I am glad to meet you. Sit down, and let us have a chat. Just fancy: I, who have been everywhere, meeting you, who have been nowhere, and meeting you just as you have broken cover for the first time! Well, they say extremes meet. To think a rolling-stone like me, and a stick-in-the-mud like you, should meet, is most wonderful. Never fifty miles from home! How do you feel, man?' 'Quite well, thank you.' 'I don't mean your health. You look all right. But don't you want to jump into a galvanic battery, and get telegraphed all over creation in five minutes? Bless my soul!' 'No; London is more than enough for me just now, little as I have seen of it.' 'Bless me, Osborne, let me shake your hand again. If I could only meet a woman like you, I think I should marry her, and settle down with, say, a thousand or two miles of rope.' 'But I should fancy a man with your enormous experience of travel would prefer a wife who could talk over the many places you had seen, and the customs you had observed.' The blue eyes of the speaker were fixed earnestly on the traveller. 'Well, I don't know. It would be a fascinating novelty to have a wife who had never been beyond the village-green. But the thing might grow monotonous after awhile. There was only one woman who ever made me think of settling down. When I speak of settling down, I mean on a continent or two.' 'And what was she?' 'A great go-about, like myself.' 'Like the lady who sat opposite you at dinner, to-day?' The steadfast blue eyes never moved from the face of the other man. Nevill bent his head forward, and said, in a dropped voice, so that the others could not hear, – 'It was she. I thought seriously of staying in New-York, and trying if I could make any impression on her.' 'And why did you not?' The blue eyes now fell to the ground. 'Well, you see, the States, Canada, Spain, and Algiers were all waiting for me.' 'And so you did not make love to her?' 'Couldn't, my dear boy. Hadn't time.' 'And where do you go to from London?' 'India.' 'When?' 'That will depend upon my luck.' 'Your luck with what?' 'Miss Gordon. I think I shall give myself a holiday, and a chance of settling down this time. Come, let us join the ladies.' They reached the drawing-room. Nevill, leaning on the arm of Osborne, walked to where Miss Gordon sat on a couch. When he came in front of her, he said, – 'Allow me, Miss Gordon, to present to you my old and valued friend, Mr Simeon Stylites. He has, to honour your arrival in London, just stepped down from his pillar on which he was born, and where he has spent all his life.' 'A descendant of the saint?' she asked archly. 'No; a descendant of the pillar. But really, Miss Gordon, Mr Osborne is a most remarkable man, and I recommend him to your best consideration. He is the Captain Cook of our time, and the enlightened savages have a savoury treat in store for them.' 'A great traveller?' she asked, with a look of interest. 'No. But his is the best performance on record at staying at home.' 'Really!' with a soft laugh. She held out her hand frankly to him. 'I am glad to meet someone who is not travel-worn, and tired of half the world.' 'This is the first time Mr Osborne has ever been fifty miles from home, and his home is a small town in the Midlands, Stratford-on-Avon.' 'I am delighted to have met you,' she said, looking him full in the face with those marvellous dark eyes. 'Do you know, Mr Osborne, you were going to say something to me at dinner, and you did not? And I should like to know what it was.' He stood for a moment mute. She curious to know what he had been about to say! It flushed him, and made the blood at his wrists tingle. It confused his head, and took his intellect away. He stammered out, – 'I really cannot remember. Something not worth your thinking of.' His face was now pale. Nevill observed the change. 'My dear Osborne, you look ill. Run to the front door for a moment and the air will put you right. Shall I go with you?' 'No, thank you. It is nothing.' After a few minutes' silence, he said, – 'I think I shall take a stroll.' 'Do,' said Nevill heartily; 'that is what will fix you up. Run off.' When he had gone, Miss Gordon said to Nevill, – 'Your friend must be ill. I am afraid he must suffer much, for he forgot me when leaving.' 'No one who has once seen you could ever forget you, Miss Gordon,' said Nevill, by way of beginning the attack. 'That is a humdrum compliment,' said she. 'You must be more original, or I shall find you dull.' George Osborne walked, he knew not whither. He felt dazed and dull. At last he paused on a bridge. He stood awhile and thought. Then he said to himself, – 'What perfume of romance have I drunk that she should make me mad?'

The Sunday dinner at Mrs Barclay's was early, and when George Osborne found himself for the first time in his life with the Thames beneath his feet, it was a little after three o'clock. 'What an amazing thing it is to be in London for the first time, and with the knowledge of eight-and-twenty years! Those who are born in London never fathom its depths, its influence, its strength, its significance, its import. 'Those who come to London young are cowed at first by its proportions, become familiar with half one district, and treat all other districts into which accident may drag them as pagan regions beyond the pale of the true civilisation. 'But I confront London for the first time in the mature years of youth, with book knowledge of all its wonders, and a feeling of brotherhood for it. Greater England is my father, but this London is my most beloved sister, of whom I am proud. 'The universe, hung by God in the viewless vault of space, and man are the most wonderful of His disclosed works, and I bow down in worship before the creator of these miracles. This London, the noblest monument of man, was reared by the hands of my brothers of Greater Britain. I am their fellow, their equal. We it was who did it. 'Under Him whom I adore, nothing fills me with such emotions of worship as the spirit of this great concrete empire, of which London is the sign-manual on earth. 'In the still meadowlands around Stratford, I have led a quiet if not a blameless life. Now and then I have been here and there-Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Leamington, Warwick, Oxford, Lichfield, Burton, Leicester; but all put together do not equal London. If I have kept away from this town until now, it was from no want of opportunities to visit it. I might have come any month. But I did not wish to come until I could stay. I deliberately did not avail myself of the opportunities I enjoyed. I studied the place afar off. I might have often come to London, but I did not. I kept aloof. I wished not to see it with my bodily eyes until I had qualified to appreciate it; just as I deferred reading Shakespeare until I thought I should be able to understand him. 'I know all the things around me. This is Blackfriars Bridge, that is Waterloo Bridge, that is the Temple, that is Somerset House, that is St Paul's. I have reverenced their spirits from afar. To-day their spirits have taken shape, and I am among the saintly shrines of my imagination. I have reverenced beauty from afar. To-day I have drunk a potion and am mad. 'Am I in love? Not I. I have a splendid madness upon me. I do not want her. I do not want her love. I want only the image as I see it. He may marry her if he will. I shall never try. I have her image, and neither tyrant nor thief can take that away from me. I make her high-priestess in the temple of my dreams. She is too sacred for me to touch. As I see her now, her image is immortal, immutable. In a few years she will change. I place my goddess with the unalterable deities of the ideal. She shall never be other to me than she is. I shall marry some day, I suppose; but I shall never marry her. The emotions which lead men to marriage have no connection with what I now feel. While I am under the spell of her presence I shall enjoy this madness. When she is gone I shall live in the light of a memory. 'I shall stay in London. I shall take chambers and live alone, that is, unless I marry. I shall lead my old life, read by night, and wander about by day. This money, into which I have just come, will yield me fifteen hundred a year; and, married or single, I shall be able to live comfortably on that. I shall live in London and cherish my image, and when I die I hope I may be found no worse than my fellow-man, and may fall within the mercy of God and the pity of my Saviour; for I must not let the little money, or London, or this wonder at the hotel turn my head and darken up my heart against the great matter of life. What fools men are to throw away the great object of all this life, either with carelessness or deliberation! No, no. I shall, I hope, retain my taste for books, and the simple faith in which I was brought up-and her image for ever.' He turned away from the parapet and crossed to the Surrey side. 'There is no great hurry,' he mused, 'for my leaving Barclay's. I can stay there a few weeks, until I get more accustomed to the crush and uproar of all London. 'Can it be Sunday? Can this be the day of rest in the capital of the British Empire? I can scarcely believe it. Here are shops open, cabs and tramcars trading just as on any other day. While I stood on the bridge I saw the steamboats crowded with people. Sunday! why, it is more like a fair! You only want the booths and the jugglers to make it a mop. I wonder these things are not stopped. All this traffic is surely against the law. It is bad in itself, and worse as an example. It ought to be stopped. It could be stopped by law, and it ought to be stopped. Why is it not stopped? 'This is Blackfriars Road. It leads into St George's Circus. I know from maps, but how different these places are from what I fancied. 'Gordon. Yes, the name is Scotch, and Marie is French. I wonder what religion she is. She has a maid, an Irish maid. The Irish are Roman Catholics, the maid is sure to be a Roman Catholic. The chances are the mistress is too, for her mother was a French Canadian. Or stop, are the French Canadians Huguenots or not? That I don't know. 'When she ceases to speak I always hear music; and when the music stops the air seems to listen for more. I wonder does such a beauty know how she fills the veins with wonder and joy? No, no. She could not know and carry her head in that way. She would have more consideration for those whose fate it is to see her a little while and lose her for ever. Because, of course, when she leaves London, I shall never see her again. Of course not. 'It is getting dusk; I had better go back, or I shall grow confused presently. It is cold. What an idiot I was to come without an overcoat! Why did I come at all? Why did I leave that warm room and that wonderful presence? Because the presence was too much for me. 'It is chilly. 'Here is the Thames again. I did not notice it much when I went over it awhile ago. Down there it flows from Westminster Bridge to meet all the other waters of the world. This is a main road to the ocean. I have seen only lanes and byways of water before, and never the sea. This is an imperial highway to the sea-the most important piece of water in the world, except the Jordan. The Amazon, the Mississippi, ay, all the watery plains of the Pacific, are nothing to man compared with this highway, from which set out the fleets of Britain. This river is the type of commerce, the symbol of enterprise; its shores are the gateway through which pass the riches and the sea-power of the greatest nation.' He left the bridge. 'I wonder is that girl still sitting where I left her? Is she sitting on that couch still, or has she left the room? How commonplace the room would be without her! All the things would look cold and cheerless. I have been in that room only once, and yet I know it would look mean and paltry without her. But when she is there everything gathers splendour from her, commonplace things are lifted up and made partakers of her glory. 'I in love with her! No more than the Straits of Dover are with Homer.' The cold began to pinch him a little, and letting go his musings, he walked rapidly back to the hotel. Without thinking of where he went, he walked into the drawing-room. By this time it was almost dark, but the gas had not yet been lighted. At first Osborne thought he was alone, but before he had reached the middle of the room that voice came to him, saying, – 'Oh, Mr Osborne, I am so glad you have come back to flirt with me. I have been doing my best to fall in love with Mr Nevill, but I couldn't. So I sent him away.' He could not have mistaken that voice. He could not mistake her voice, but he must have mistaken the words. What, his divinity speak thus! Monstrous! 'Shall I light the gas for you, Miss Gordon?' he asked, in a cold, formal tone. 'Yes, turn up the gas for

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