Doctor Claudius, A True Story Part 5

"Permit me to present my friend, Professor Claudius," said Barker.

Claudius bowed very low. The plunge was over, and he recovered his outward calm, whatever he might feel.

"Mr. Barker flatters me, Madam," he said quietly. "I am not a professor, but only a private lecturer."

"I am too far removed from anything learned to make such distinctions,"

said the Countess. "But since good fortune has brought you into the circle of my ignorance, let me renew my thanks for the service you did me in Heidelberg the other day."

Claudius bowed and murmured something inaudible.

"Or had you not realised that I was the heroine of the parasol at the broken tower?" asked Margaret smiling, as she seated herself in a low chair and motioned to her guests to follow her example. Barker selected a comfortable seat, and arranged the cus.h.i.+on to suit him before he subsided into repose, but the Doctor laid hands on a stern and solid-looking piece of carving, and sat upright facing the Countess.

"Pardon me," said he, "I had. But it is always startling to realise a dream." The Countess looked at Claudius rather inquiringly; perhaps she had not expected he was the sort of man to begin an acquaintance by making compliments. However, she said nothing, and he continued, "Do you not always find it so?"

"The bearded hermit is no duffer," thought Mr. Barker. "He will say grace over the whole barrel of pork."

"Ah! I have few dreams," replied the Countess, "and when I do have any, I never realise them. I am a very matter-of-fact person."

"What matters the fact when you are the person, Madam?" retorted Claudius, fencing for a discussion of some kind.

"Immense," thought Mr. Barker, changing one leg over the other and becoming interested.

"Does that mean anything, or is it only a pretty paradox?" asked the lady, observing that Claudius had thrown himself boldly into a crucial position. Upon his answer would probably depend her opinion of him as being either intelligent or _ba.n.a.l_ It is an easy matter to frame paradoxical questions implying a compliment, but it is no light task to be obliged to answer them oneself. Claudius was not thinking of producing an effect, for the fascination of the dark woman was upon him, and the low, strange voice bewitched him, so he said what came uppermost.

"Yes," said he, "there are persons whose lives may indeed be matters of fact to themselves--who shall say?--but who are always dreams in the lives of others."

"Charming," laughed the Countess, "do you always talk like that, Professor Claudius?"

"I have always thought," Mr. Barker remarked in his high-set voice, "that I would like to be the dream of somebody's life. But somehow things have gone against me."

The other two laughed. He did not strike one as the sort of individual who would haunt the love-sick dreams of a confiding heart.

"I would rather it were the other way," said Claudius thoughtfully.

"And I," rejoined the American, "would drink perdition to the unattainable."

"Either I do not agree with you, Mr. Barker," said the Countess, "or else I believe nothing is unattainable."

"I implore you to be kind, and believe the latter," he answered courteously.

"Come, I will show you my garden," said Margaret rising. "It is pleasanter in the open air." She led the way out through the gla.s.s door, the men walking on her right and left.

"I am very fond of my garden," she said, "and I take great care of it when I am here." She stopped and pulled two or three dead leaves off a rosebush to ill.u.s.trate her profession of industry.

"And do you generally live here?" asked Claudius, who was as yet in complete ignorance of the Countess's name, t.i.tle, nationality, and mode of life, for Mr. Barker had, for some occult reason, left him in the dark.

Perhaps the Countess guessed as much, for she briefly imparted a good deal of information.

"When Count Alexis, my husband, was alive, we lived a great deal in Russia. But I am an American like Mr. Barker, and I occasionally make a trip to my native country. However, I love this place in summer, and I always try to be here. That is my friend, Miss Skeat, who lives with me."

Miss Skeat was stranded under a tree with a newspaper and several books.

Her polished cheekbones and knuckles glimmered yellow in the shade. By her side was a long cane chair, in which lay a white silk wrap and a bit of needlework, tumbled together as the Countess had left them when she went in to receive her visitors. Miss Skeat rose as the party approached. The Countess introduced the two men, who bowed low, and they all sat down, Mr. Barker on the bench by the ancient virgin, and Claudius on the gra.s.s at Margaret's feet. It was noonday, but there was a light breeze through, the flowers and gra.s.ses. The conversation soon fell into pairs as they sat.

"I should not have said, at first sight, that you were a very imaginative person, Dr. Claudius," said the Countess.

"I have been dreaming for years," he answered. "I am a mathematician, and of late I have become a philosopher in a small way, as far as that is possible from reading the subject. There are no two branches of learning that require more imagination than mathematics and philosophy."

"Philosophy, perhaps," she replied, "but mathematics--I thought that was an exact science, where everything was known, and there was no room for dreaming."

"I suppose that is the general impression. But do you think it requires no imagination to conceive a new application of knowledge, to invent new methods where old ones are inadequate, to lay out a route through the unknown land beyond the regions of the known?"

"Ordinary people, like me, a.s.sociate mathematics with measurement and figures and angles."

"Yes," said Claudius, "but it is the same as though you confused religion with its practical results. If the religion is true at all, it would be just as true if man did not exist, and if it consequently had no application to life."

"I understand the truth of that, though we might differ about the word.

So you have been dreaming for years--and what were your dreams like?"

The Countess looked down earnestly at Claudius, who in his turn looked at her with a little smile. She thought he was different from other men, and he was wondering how much of his dreams he might tell her.

"Of all sorts," he answered, still looking up into her face. "Bitter and sweet. I have dreamed of the glory of life and of mind-power, of the accomplishment of the greatest good to the greatest number; I have believed the extension of science possible 'beyond the bounds of all imaginable experience' into the realms of the occult and hidden; I have wandered with Hermes by the banks of the Nile, with Gautama along the mud-flats of the Ganges. I have disgusted myself with the writings of those who would reduce all history and religion to solar myths, and I have striven to fathom the meaning of those whose thoughts are profound and their hearts n.o.ble, but their speech halting. I have dreamed many things, Countess, and the worst is that I have lived to weary of my dreams, and to say that all things are vanity--all save one," he added with hesitation. There was a momentary pause.

"Of course," Mr. Barker was saying to Miss Skeat, with a fascinating smile, "I have the greatest admiration for Scotch heroism. John Grahame of Claver-house. Who can read Macaulay's account--"

"Ah," interrupted the old gentlewoman, "if you knew how I feel about these odious calumnies!"

"I quite understand that," said Barker sympathetically. He had discovered Miss Skeat's especial enthusiasm.

Margaret turned again to the Doctor.

"And may I ask, without indiscretion, what the one dream may be that you have refused to relegate among the vanities?"

"Woman," answered Claudius, and was silent.

The Countess thought the Doctor spoke ironically, and she laughed aloud, half amused and half annoyed. "I am in earnest," said Claudius, plucking a blade of gra.s.s and twisting it round his finger.

"Truly?" asked she.

"Foi de gentilhomme!" he answered.

"But Mr. Barker told me you lived like a hermit."

"That is the reason it has been a dream," said he.

"You have not told me what the dream was like. What beautiful things have you fancied about us?"

"I have dreamed of woman's mission, and of woman's love. I have fancied that woman and woman's love represented the ruling spirit, as man and man's brain represent the moving agent, in the world. I have drawn pictures of an age in which real chivalry of word and thought and deed might be the only law necessary to control men's actions. Not the scenic and theatrical chivalry of the middle age, ready at any moment to break out into epidemic crime, but a true reverence and understanding of woman's supreme right to honour and consideration; an age wherein it should be no longer coa.r.s.ely said that love is but an episode in the brutal life of man, while to woman it is life itself. I have dreamed that the eternal womanhood of the universe beckoned me to follow."

The Countess could not take her eyes off Claudius. She had never met a man like him; at least she had never met a man who plunged into this kind of talk after half an hour's acquaintance. There was a thrill of feeling in her smooth deep voice when she answered: "If all men thought as you think, the world would be a very different place."