Why wouldn't
Watts-Dunton roar him an opportunity? I felt I had been right perhaps
in feeling that the lesser man was--no, not jealous of the greater
whom he had guarded so long and with such love, but anxious that he
himself should be as fully impressive to visitors as his fine gifts
warranted. Not, indeed, that he monopolised the talk. He seemed to
regard me as a source of information about all the latest `movements,'
and I had to shout banalities while he munched his mutton--banalities
whose one saving grace for me was that they were inaudible to
Swinburne. Had I met Swinburne's gaze, I should have faltered. Now and
again his shining light-grey eyes roved from the table, darting this
way and that--across the room, up at the ceiling, out of the window;
only never at us. Somehow this aloofness gave no hint of indifference.
It seemed to be, rather, a point in good manners--the good manners of
a child `sitting up to table,' not `staring,' not `asking questions,'
and reflecting great credit on its invaluable old nurse. The child sat
happy in the wealth of its inner life; the child was content not to
speak until it were spoken to; but, but, I felt it did want to he
spoken to. And, at length, it was.
So soon as the mutton had been replaced by the apple-pie, Watts-Dunton
leaned forward and `Well, Algernon,' he roared, `how was it on the
Heath to-day?' Swinburne, who had meekly inclined his ear to the
question, now threw back his head, uttering a sound that was like the
cooing of a dove, and forthwith, rapidly, ever so musically, he spoke
to us of his walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been
taking his daily exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a
Peri who had at long last been suffered to pass through Paradise.
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