Now if ever was the moment to face his future, and rough-shape it like a man! He was alone: Hekla, of course, had seen to that before the cerise Rochet-Schneider had whirled him to the historic terminus. Good old Hekla!
And so his musefulness was undisturbed as he gazed contemplatively out upon the Thames-beribboned landskip. Afar off he could discern the glaucous billows of the Chilterns rolling up from the plain, flecked here and there with leafless hedgery, and the hiemal beech-clumps of Pruneley and Greatstock Major. In the middle distance, placid and content, the fickle weathercocks gleamed in the faint blue smoke of half-a-hundred hidden villages, and in the foreground the flocculent cumuli were mirrored in the shining expanse of water-meadows, their erstwhile lushery now o’erflowed by the meandering floods of Januarytide. Over all drooped a sombre baldacchino of slate-coloured sky.
“Gauguin,” he murmured appreciatively. “Pure Gauguin!”[14]
[14] Mr. Budd enjoys the rare distinction of having spelt this painter’s name correctly in a first novel. (LIT. EXEC.)
“But English,” he went on. “Oh, ludicrously English … most distressingly English.…” And, first sign of the potent influence which these London days and London nights had wrought upon his sensibilities, he jerked down the blind, to shut out the exasperating familiarity of that fugacious country-side.
He knew of a certainty that he had not yet exhausted the surprises prepared for him by Destiny. There had been fairies at his christening (in St. James’s, Piccadilly). And now the memories of that unforgettable night at the Régale were drumming in his veins like some insidious and urgent poison. A new consciousness was dawning upon him, and he gazed on its unfolding contours, like stout Darien in the sonnet, in the mute silence of amazement.
Recovering himself, “New term, new life,” he murmured neatly. And the train picked up the rhythm of the words as it rolled relentlessly onwards.…
That evening Gaveston sat alone in his room, amusedly aware that in another Gothic chamber an eager assemblage of Mongoons were gulping their barley-water in tenterhooked anticipation of his momently arrival. But far different were his thoughts from what those polished Philistines would have expected in their hero.