“He’s a poor guide,” said Sir Edwin. “Really, Lilian, I begin to think that Harold is rather stupid. Of course I’m very fond of him, he’s a thoroughly nice fellow, honest as the day, and he’s good-looking and well made—I value all that extremely—but after all brains are something. He is so slow—so lamentably slow—at catching one’s meaning.”
“But, father dear,” replied Lilian, who was devoted to Harold, “he’s tired.”
“I am tired, too, but I can keep my wits about me. He seems in a dream; when the horse fell he never attempted to get down and sit on its head. It might have kicked us to pieces. He’s as helpless as a baby with beggars. He’s too idle to walk properly; three times he trod on my toes, and he fell up the temple steps and broke your camera. He’s blind, he’s deaf—I may say he’s dumb, too. Now this is pure stupidity, and I believe that stupidity can be cured just like anything else, if you make the effort.”
Lilian continued the defence, and repeated that he had hardly slept for three nights.
“Ridiculous. Why can’t he sleep? It’s stupidity again. An effort is needed—that is all. He can cure it if he chooses.”
“He does know how to cure it,” said Lilian, “but you thought—and so did he—that—”
She produced an explosion of ill-temper in her father, which was quite unprecedented.
“I’m very much annoyed with him. He has no right to play tricks with his brain. And what’s more I am annoyed with Mildred, too.”
“Oh, father!”
“She encourages him in his silliness—makes him think he’s clever. I’m extremely annoyed, and I shall speak to them both, as soon as I get the opportunity.”
Lilian was surprised and pained. Her father had never blamed anyone so strongly before. She did not know—indeed, he did not know himself—that neither the indigestion nor the heat, nor the beggars, nor the fleas were the real cause of his irritation. He was annoyed because he failed to understand.
Mildred he could pardon; she had merely been indiscreet, and as she had gone in for being clever when quite a child, such things were to be expected from her. Besides, he shrewdly guessed that, although she might sometimes indulge in fancies, yet when it came to action she could be trusted to behave in a thoroughly conventional manner. Thank heaven! she was seldom guilty of confusing books with life.
But Harold did not escape so easily, for Sir Edwin absolutely failed to understand him, for the first time. Hitherto he had believed that he understood him perfectly. Harold’s character was so simple; it consisted of little more than two things, the power to love and the desire for truth, and Sir Edwin, like many a wiser thinker, concluded that what was not complicated could not be mysterious. Similarly, because Harold’s intellect did not devote itself to the acquisition of facts or to the elaboration of emotions, he had concluded that he was stupid. But now, just because he could send himself to sleep by an unexplained device, he spied a mystery in him, and was aggrieved.
He was right. There was a mystery, and a great one. Yet it was trivial and unimportant in comparison with the power to love and the desire for truth—things which he saw daily, and, because he had seen daily, ignored.
His meditations took shape, and he flung this challenge at the unknown: “I’ll have no queerness in a son-in-law!” He was sitting in a Doric temple with a sea of gold and purple flowers tossing over its ruins, and his eyes looked out to the moving, living sea of blue. But his ears caught neither the echo of the past nor the cry of the present, for he was suddenly paralysed with the fear that after all he had not done so well for his daughter as he hoped.
Meanwhile, Mildred, at the other end of the line of temples, was concentrated on the echoes of the past. Harold was even more inattentive to them than usual. He was very sleepy, and would only say that the flowers were rather jolly and that the sea looked in prime condition if only one could try it. To the magnificence and pathos of the ruined temple of Zeus he was quite dead. He only valued it as a chair.
“Suppose you go back and rest in the carriage?” said Mildred, with a shade of irritation in her voice.
He shook his head and sat yawning at the sea, thinking how wonderfully the water would fizz up over his body and how marvellously cold would be the pale blue pools among the rocks. Mildred endeavoured to recall him to higher pleasures by reading out of her Baedeker.
She turned round to explain something and he was gone.
At first she thought it was a mild practical joke, such as they did not disdain to play on each other; then that he had changed his mind and gone back to the carriage. But the custodian at the gate said that no one had gone out, and she returned to search the ruins.
The temple of Zeus—the third greatest temple of the Greek world—has been overthrown by an earthquake, and now resembles a ruined mountain rather than a ruined building. There is a well-made path, which makes a circuit over the mass, and is amply sufficient for all rational tourists. Those who wish to see more have to go mountaineering over gigantic columns and pilasters, and squeeze their way through passes of cut stone.
Harold was not on the path, and Mildred was naturally annoyed. Few things are more vexatious for a young lady than to go out with an escort and return without. It argues remissness on her own part quite as much as on that of her swain.
Having told the custodian to stop Harold if he tried to come out, she began a systematic hunt. She saw an enormous block of stone
