Chapter 11 - Page 2

minutes,
there was projected across this clearness the image of a massive
middle-aged man seated on a bench under a tree, with sad far-
wandering eyes and plump white hands folded on the head of a stick-
-a stick I recognised, a stout gold-headed staff that I had given
him in devoted days. I stopped short as he turned his face to me,
and it happened that for some reason or other I took in as I had
perhaps never done before the beauty of his rich blank gaze. It
was charged with experience as the sky is charged with light, and I
felt on the instant as if we had been overspanned and conjoined by
the great arch of a bridge or the great dome of a temple.
Doubtless I was rendered peculiarly sensitive to it by something in
the way I had been giving him up and sinking him. While I met it I
stood there smitten, and I felt myself responding to it with a sort
of guilty grimace. This brought back his attention in a smile
which expressed for me a cheerful weary patience, a bruised noble
gentleness. I had told Miss Anvoy that he had no dignity, but what
did he seem to me, all unbuttoned and fatigued as he waited for me
to come up, if he didn't seem unconcerned with small things, didn't
seem in short majestic? There was majesty in his mere
unconsciousness of our little conferences and puzzlements over his
maintenance and his reward.

After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big
soft shoulder--wherever you touched him you found equally little
firmness--and said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on
my own ear: "Come back to town with me, old friend--come back and
spend the evening." I wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep him,
and at Waterloo, an hour later, I telegraphed possessively to the
Mulvilles. When he objected, as regards staying all night, that he
had no things, I asked him if he hadn't everything of mine. I had
abstained from ordering dinner, and it was too late for
preliminaries at a club; so we were reduced to tea and fried fish
at my rooms--reduced also to the transcendent. Something had come
up which made me want him to feel at peace with me--and which,
precisely, was all the dear man himself wanted on any occasion. I
had too often had to press upon him considerations irrelevant, but
it gives me pleasure now to think that on that particular evening I
didn't even mention Mrs. Saltram and the children. Late into the
night we smoked and talked; old shames and old rigours fell away
from us; I only let him see that I was conscious of what I owed
him. He was as mild as contrition and as copious as faith; he was
never so fine as on a shy return, and even better at forgiving than
at being forgiven. I dare say it was a smaller matter than that
famous night at