CHAPTER IX.

THE LOOSENED GRIP.

"Bladud, the son of Lud, founded this Bath three hundred years before Christ."

It was a far cry from Bladud to Nicholas Jardine! A goodly span, too, from the time when a great statesman was carried through the streets of Bath, swathed in flannels; his livid face, peering through the windows of the sedan chair, the fierce eyes staring from beneath his powdered wig. One can almost see his ghost in Milsom Street, and hear the whisper spread from group to group: "There he goes! the great Commoner, Mr. Pitt!"

And now through the streets of the same town they wheeled a very different sort of statesman; and yet, perhaps, the product, by slow processes of inevitable evolution, of that very time "when America thrust aside the British sceptre, when the ingenious machine of Dr. Guillotine removed the heads of King and Queen in France, when Ireland rose in rebellion, when Napoleon grasped at the dominion of the Western World, when Wellington fought the French Marshals in Spain," and when, God be thanked! Nelson triumphed in Trafalgar Bay.

Just as the inhabitants and visitors of Bath used to take off their hats to William Pitt in his sedan chair, so now the new generation saluted Nicholas Jardine, when, seated in his bath-chair, he was drawn through the streets to the baths. For though times were changed, the President in his way was a great personage--such a remarkably successful man; and in all times it has been proved true that nothing succeeds like success. Jardine, when he acknowledged these salutations, showed an awkwardness unknown to those to the Manor born. It disconcerted him to be stared at, especially now that he was ill. He hated traversing the public streets, and often sat with closed eyes until his chair entered the bathing establishment. Once there he became alert and interested--but not in the reminiscences of Georgian functions and the manners and customs of the fops and flirts of that vanished period. What appealed to him, as a trained mechanic, was the heritage of far remoter days. The brain of the Roman Engineer and the skilled hand of the Roman Architect and Mason had left these signs and wonders for future generations to look upon. The great rectangular bath had only been uncovered about sixty years earlier. The Goths and Vandals of an earlier period had built over it their trumpery shops and dwelling-houses. But the present bath, with its modern additions, actually was built upon the ancient piers. The very pavements, or scholæ, that bordered it were those which the Roman bathers had trod. The recesses or exedræ corresponded with those at Pompeii, and had been used for hanging the clothes of the Roman bathers or for resting places. The floor of the bath was coated with lead, and in all probability that lead was brought from the Roman mines in the Mendip Hills, where had been discovered the imperial emblems of Claudius and Vespasian.

The President was not without a sense of the beautiful. The scene around him awakened his imagination. He knew that the wooded slopes of the stately hills, the stone hewn from the inexhaustible quarries, and the broad river--formerly spanned by bridges and aqueducts graceful in outline and noble in proportions--each and all had furnished the means which skilful hands had put to glorious uses. Yet all these ingredients of beauty might have remained unused but for the wonderful thermal waters which here, for untold centuries, had risen ceaselessly from fathomless depths, streaming ever from rocky fissures, filling the pools and natural basins, and still overflowing into the rushing river.

But this beneficent spring and these now verdant hills must have had their remote origin in some terrible concussion of natural forces. Mother Earth had laboured and brought them forth, far back in her pre-historic ages. Subterranean fires, begotten by the portentous union of iron and sulphur, had waited their appointed time. Drop after drop, the hidden waters had filtered on inflammable ingredients, until the imprisoned air at last exploded, and the earth, rending and rocking in appalling convulsions, opened enormous chasms and brought forth, amid fire and smoke and vapour, the embryo of all this lovely scene. The City was the offspring of seismic action; the earth had travailed and brought forth these wooded hills. The smiling valley, where now stood the City, was but the crater of an extinct volcano, perpetuated in memory by the steaming waters that still gushed upward from the mystic depths.

Below the streets and houses of the modern town were the original baths of the City of Sulcastra, of many acres in extent. Here, indeed, in this most wonderful of Spas, history unfolded itself page by page--the City of Sul in the grip, successively, of Roman, Saxon, Dane; dynasty succeeding dynasty, sovereign coming after sovereign, statesman after statesman, until now, when a Walsall mechanic in a bath-chair was all that England had to show by way of substitute for absolute sovereignty and sceptred sway.

And with Nicholas Jardine, too, the relentless law of time was at work. The sceptre was falling from his grasp. The grass withereth; the flower fadeth. Man passes to his long home, and the mourners go about the street. Would it be his turn next? Every day Zenobia seemed to see in her father's face signs of a slowly working change. She witnessed the melancholy spectacle of waning strength, of failing interest in those things that once had absorbed his thoughts and energies. It wrought in her a corresponding change, a protective tenderness which she had never felt before, a deepening sense of the transience and sadness of human pomp and circumstance, a broadened sympathy with all the sons of men.

A great silence seemed to have fallen upon the man who in the past had made so many speeches. A brooding wistfulness revealed itself in his expression. There was a haunting look of doubt or question in his eyes, a look as of one who, without compass and without rudder, finds himself drifting on an unknown sea. The land was fading from his sight. The solid earth on which he had walked, self-confident, self-sufficient, no longer gave him foothold. His nerveless hands were losing grip on the only life of which he knew anything, the only life in which he had been able to believe. And day by day, and night by night, there came to his mind the memory of his earlier life, of the faith that he had seen shining in the dying eyes of the woman who had believed while he had disbelieved. Vividly he recalled to mind--albeit with a sense of wonder and irritation--an occasion when he had sat beside her in the old Cathedral at Lichfield. The sun was setting, and its glory illumined the huge western window; the words of the great man of action, who was also the man of great faith, were being read from the lectern, and at a certain passage his wife had turned and looked at him with sad and supplicating eyes: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."

If in this life only ...! All other hope he had scorned and rejected. No other hope had seemed needful to his happiness and success. But now? Already _this_ life was dwindling and departing. He felt it; he knew it in his inmost being, as his steps faltered, his hands grew thin and pallid, and his brain, once so busy with a hundred projects and ambitions, now refused to work, or brought to him only recurrent recollections of things which in the prime and strength of his manhood he had scouted and despised.

If in this life only ...!

Sometimes a great restlessness possessed him, and Zenobia, in the silent watches of the night, heard him moving heavily and slowly about his room. On one of these nights, anxious and alarmed, she hurried in and found him standing at the window in the darkness. The furnished house they occupied was on Bathwick Hill, and the night scene from the windows was one of striking mystery and beauty. The blackness of the valley in which lay the ancient city, and of the towering hills on every side, was studded with myriads of lights--shining like stars in an inverted firmament.

"Father!"

She crossed the room and laid her hand upon his arm; but, scarcely heeding her, the sick man still stood by the window, looking as if fascinated on the magical scene of the night. Zenobia also gazed, and gazed steadfastly; but the impression made upon herself was wholly different. With him it was a sad impression of farewell. But in Zenobia's brain there suddenly sprang up an extraordinary sense of recognition. There was a subtle, haunting familiarity in the scene she looked upon--this valley and these hills, in and about which all that was modern, save the lights, was quite invisible. Thus might the valley of Sulcastra have looked under the darkened sky two thousand years ago. Thus might the lamps of Roman villas, temples, baths, and public buildings have twinkled when a vestal virgin, maintaining Sul's undying fires upon the altar, looked down upon the silent city.

The puzzled girl caught her breath, half sighing, unable to shake off the belief that at some remote period she had gone through precisely the same experience that was now presented to her. And, doubly strange, in connection with the scene, though she could see no reason for it, her thoughts flew instantly to Linton Herrick. She became oppressed, almost suffocated, with a sense as of pre-existence--a bewildering sensation, almost a revelation--that seemed to tell of the mystery of the ego, of the indestructibility of human life.

* * * * *

It was the last time that Nicholas Jardine looked down upon the old city, by night or by day. The next day he remained in bed, and the day after, and all the days that were left to him. The afternoon sunshine came upon the walls, the shadows followed, night succeeded day. The demarcations of time became blurred. His calendar was growing shorter and shorter. The world mattered less and less to him, who had played a leading part in it; and already he mattered nothing to the world. Death was not close at hand. Nevertheless he was dying.

"For this losing is true dying: This is lordly man's down-lying: This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world resigning."