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It is only by self-sacrifice for the sake of others that the supreme heights are to be attained." For the first time Austin's face fell. He tossed his long hair off his forehead, and toyed silently with his cigarette. "Is that a hard saying?" resumed St Aubyn, smiling. "It has high authority, however. Think it over at your leisure. Have you finished? Come, then, and let me show you the pictures.
"Who asked you to take a ticket for that reading?" "I don't know, really Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up." "It's just the sort of damnable vulgarity she's capable of! It's loathsome it's monstrous " His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, "I thought so too. It was for that reason I didn't go. But you must remember that very few people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do "
As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable and self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not unwilling his departure should have left.
Aunt Charlotte turned round, looking slightly dazed. "Going to lunch with whom?" she asked. "With Mr St Aubyn. You know he lives at Moorcombe Court. I met him in the woods and had a long talk with him, and now he's going to show me all his pictures and his engravings and his wonderful orchids and things. I'm to spend all the afternoon with him. Isn't it splendid!
A somewhat incongruous object, amid that rural scene, and not a very prepossessing one; but apparently a gentleman, though scarcely of the stamp of St Aubyn. At last he came quite near, and Austin moved as though to let him pass. "Don't trouble yourself, young gentleman," said the newcomer, in a good-humoured, offhand way. "Can you tell me whether I'm anywhere near a place called Moorcombe Court?"
If Aubyn Auberley had not been despoiled of all true manliness, by the petting and the froward wit of many a foreign lady, he might have won the pure salvation of an earnest love. But, when judged by that French standard which was now supreme at court, this poor Frida was a rustic, only fit to go to school. There was another fine young fellow who thought wholly otherwise.
When the late Sir Gilbert Aubyn, the famous neo-Gothic architect, was called in to restore Porthennis Church or, as we say in Cornwall, to "restroy" it he swept the remnants away. But the legend survives, ferro perennius. We sat and talked in the Vicarage garden overlooking Mount's Bay.
Only he had shown such foul contempt of Aubyn Auberley, proceeding to extremes of ill-behaviour toward his raiment, that for months young Frida had been forced to keep him chained, and take her favourite walks without him. "Ah, Lear!" now she cried, with sense of long injustice toward him; "you were right, and I was wrong; at least at least it seems so."
"Well, what have you been reading, then?" enquired St Aubyn, lighting a cigarette. "I've been dipping into one of the most puzzling, fascinating, bothering books I ever came across," replied Austin, following his example. "I mean 'The Garden of Cyrus, by Sir Thomas Browne. I can't follow him a bit, and yet, somehow, he drags me along with him. All that about the quincunx is most baffling.
He spoke huskily, and with evident effort. I assented eagerly. The following, recounted in broken sentences, and with many abrupt pauses, is the story to which I listened: Mr St Aubyn was a widower. His only child, a boy twelve years of age, had been for a year past afflicted with loss of speech and hearing, the result of a severe typhoid fever, from which he barely escaped with life.
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