And on every word that had been spoken in that room. Language is like shot silk; so much depends on the angle at which it is held.

He heard the quiet opening of the door. But he did not turn. In a moment a hand lay on the high backrail of the wooden chair on which he sat. He did not speak and the owner of the hand did not speak; absorbed by the watch, the child too was silent. In some distant house an amateur, a lady with time on her hands—not in them, for the execution was poor, redeemed only by distance—began to play the piano: a Chopin mazurka, filtered through walls, through leaves and sunlight. Only that jerkily onward sound indicated progression. Otherwise it was the impossible: History reduced to a living stop, a photograph in flesh.

But the little girl grew bored, and reached for her mother’s arms. She was lifted, dandled, then carried away a few steps. Charles remained staring out of the window a long moment. Then he stood and faced Sarah and her burden. Her eyes were still grave, but she had a little smile. Now, he was being taunted. But he would have traveled four million miles to be taunted so.

The child reached towards the floor, having seen its doll there. Sarah stooped a moment, retrieved it and gave it to her. For a moment she watched the absorption of the child against her shoulder in the toy; then her eyes came to rest on Charles’s feet. She could not look him in the eyes.

“What is her name?”

“Lalage.” She pronounced it as a dactyl, the g hard. Still she could not raise her eyes. “Mr. Rossetti approached me one day in the street. I did not know it, but he had been watching me. He asked to be allowed to draw me. She was not yet born. He was most kind in all ways when he knew of my circumstances. He himself proposed the name. He is her godfather.” She murmured, “I know it is strange.”

Strange certainly were Charles’s feelings; and the ultimate strangeness was only increased by this curious soliciting of his opinion on such, in such circumstances, a trivial matter; as if at the moment his ship had struck a reef his advice was asked on the right material for the cabin upholstery. Yet numbed, he found himself answering.

“It is Greek. From lalageo, to babble like a brook.”

Sarah bowed her head, as if modestly grateful for this etymological information. Still Charles stared at her, his masts crashing, the cries of the drowning in his mind’s ears. He would never forgive her.

He heard her whisper, “You do not like it?”

“I…” he swallowed. “Yes. It is a pretty name.”

And again her head bowed. But he could not move, could not rid his eyes of their terrible interrogation; as a man stares at the fallen masonry that might, had he passed a moment later, have crushed him to extinction; at hazard, that element the human mentality so habitually disregards, dismisses to the lumber room of myth, made flesh in this figure, this double figure before him. Her eyes stayed down, masked by the dark lashes. But he saw, or sensed, tears upon them. He took two or three involuntary steps towards her. Then again he stopped. He could not, he could not… the words, though low, burst from him.

“But why? Why? What if I had never…”

Her head sank even lower. He barely caught her answer.

“It had to be so.”

And he comprehended: it had been in God’s hands, in His forgiveness of their sins. Yet still he stared down at her hidden face.

“And all those cruel words you spoke… forced me to speak in answer?”

“Had to be spoken.”

At last she looked up at him. Her eyes were full of tears, and her look unbearably naked. Such looks we have all once or twice in our lives received and shared; they are those in which worlds melt, pasts dissolve, moments when we know, in the resolution of profoundest need, that the rock of ages can never be anything else but love, here, now, in these two hands’ joining, in this blind silence in which one head comes to rest beneath the other; and which Charles, after a compressed eternity, breaks, though the question is more breathed than spoken.

“Shall I ever understand your parables?”

The head against his breast shakes with a mute vehemence. A long moment. The pressure of lips upon auburn hair. In the distant house the untalented lady, no doubt seized by remorse (or perhaps by poor Chopin’s tortured ghost), stops playing. And Lalage, as if brought by the merciful silence to reflect on the aesthetics of music and having reflected, to bang her rag doll against his bent cheek, reminds her father—high time indeed—that a thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.

61

It is a time-proven rule of the novelist’s craft never to introduce any but very minor new characters at the end of a book. I hope Lalage may be forgiven; but the extremely important-looking person that has, during the last scene, been leaning against the parapet of the embankment across the way from 16 Cheyne Walk, the residence of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who took—and died of—chloral, by the way, not opium) may seem at first sight to represent a gross breach of the rule. I did not want to introduce him; but since he is the sort of man who cannot bear to be left out of the limelight, the kind of man who travels first class or not at all, for whom the first is the only pronoun, who in short has first things on the brain, and since I am the kind of man who refuses to intervene in nature (even the worst), he has got himself in—or as he would put it, has got himself in as he really is. I shall not labor the implication that he was previously got in as he really wasn’t, and is therefore not truly a new character at all; but rest assured that this personage is, in spite of appearances, a very minor figure—as minimal, in fact, as a gamma-ray particle.

As he really is….and his true colors are not pleasant ones. The once full, patriarchal beard of the railway compartment has been trimmed down to something rather foppish and Frenchified. There is about the clothes, in the lavishly embroidered summer waistcoat, in the three rings on the fingers, the panatella in its amber holder, the malachite-headed cane, a distinct touch of the flashy. He looks very much as if he has given up preaching and gone in for grand opera; and done much better at the latter than the former. There is, in short, more than a touch of the successful impresario about him.

And now, as he negligently supports himself on the parapet, he squeezes the tip of his nose lightly between the knuckles of his beringed first and middle fingers. One has the impression he can hardly contain his amusement. He is staring back towards Mr. Rossetti’s house; and with an almost proprietory air, as if it is some new theater he has just bought and is pretty confident he can fill. In this he has not changed: he very evidently regards the world as his to possess and use as he likes.

But now he straightens. This flanerie in Chelsea has been a pleasant interlude, but more important business awaits him. He takes out his watch—a Breguet—and selects a small key from a vast number on a second gold chain. He makes a small adjustment to the time. It seems—though unusual in an instrument from the bench of the greatest of watchmakers—that he was running a quarter of an hour fast. It is doubly strange, for there is no visible clock by which he could have discovered the error in his own timepiece. But the reason may be guessed. He is meanly providing himself with an excuse for being late at his next appointment. A certain kind of tycoon cannot bear to seem at fault over even the most trivial matters.