He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited
the depths of Asia, spending himself on scenes of
romantic interest, of superlative sanctity; but what
was present to him everywhere was that for a man who
had known what he had known the world was vulgar
and vain. The state of mind in which he had
lived for so many years shone out to him, in reflexion,
as a light that coloured and refined, a light beside
which the glow of the East was garish cheap and thin.
The terrible truth was that he had lost—with
everything else—a distinction as well the
things he saw couldn’t help being common when
he had become common to look at them. He was
simply now one of them himself—he was in
the dust, without a peg for the sense of difference;
and there were hours when, before the temples of gods
and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for
nobleness of association to the barely discriminated
slab in the London suburb. That had become for
him, and more intensely with time and distance, his
one witness of a past glory. It was all that
was left to him for proof or pride, yet the past glories
of Pharaohs were nothing to him as he thought of it.
Small wonder then that he came back to it on the morrow
of his return. He was drawn there this time
as irresistibly as the other, yet with a confidence,
almost, that was doubtless the effect of the many
months that had elapsed. He had lived, in spite
of himself, into his change of feeling, and in wandering
over the earth had wandered, as might be said, from
the circumference to the centre of his desert.
He had settled to his safety and accepted perforce
his extinction; figuring to himself, with some colour,
in the likeness of certain little old men he remembered
to have seen, of whom, all meagre and wizened as they
might look, it was related that they had in their
time fought twenty duels or been loved by ten princesses.
They indeed had been wondrous for others while he
was but wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly
the cause of his haste to renew the wonder by getting
back, as he might put it, into his own presence.
That had quickened his steps and checked his delay.
If his visit was prompt it was because he had been
separated so long from the part of himself that alone
he now valued.
It’s accordingly not false to say that he reached
his goal with a certain elation and stood there again
with a certain assurance. The creature beneath
the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely
now, the place had lost for him its mere blankness
of expression. It met him in mildness—not,
as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of
conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in
things that have closely belonged to us and which
seem to confess of themselves to the connexion.
The plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tended
flowers affected him so as belonging to him that he
resembled for the hour a contented landlord reviewing
