"It was sure to come to you, since you wanted it enough," she said.
"Yes, but in time?" exclaimed Hillyard.
"In time for what?"
Hillyard broke into a laugh.
"I don't know," he answered. He was silent for a little while, and the comfort of the room, the quiet of the night, the pleasant sympathy of Stella Croyle, all wrought upon him. "I don't know," he repeated slowly. "I am waiting. But out of my queer life something more has got to come—something more and something different. I have always been sure of it, but I used to be afraid that the opportunity would come while I was still chained to the handles of the barrow."
Hillyard's life, though within a short time its vicissitudes had been many and most divergent, had probably not been as strange as he imagined it to be. He looked back upon it with too intense an interest to be its impartial judge. Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether. At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition.
His father, a partner in a small firm of shipping agents which had not the tradition of a solid, old-fashioned business, had moved in Martin's boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps in one suburb, to a house in a garden of trees in another. The boy had been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size, which gathered its pupils into its class-rooms at nine o'clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four. No boy was proud that he went to school at St. Eldred's, or was deterred from any meanness by the thought that it was a breach of the school's traditions. The school meant so many lessons in so many class-rooms, and no more.
Hillyard was the only child. Between himself and his parents there was little sympathy and understanding. He saw them at meals, and fled from the table to his own room, where he read voraciously.
"You never heard of such a jumble of books," he said to Stella Croyle. "Matthew Arnold, Helps, Paradise Lost, Ten Thousand a Year, The Revolt of Islam, Tennyson. I knew the whole of In Memoriam by heart—absolutely every line of it, and pages of Browning. The little brown books! I would walk miles to pick one of them up. My people would find the books lying about the house, and couldn't make head or tail of why I wanted to read them. There were two red-letter days: one when I first bought the two volumes of Herrick, the second when I tumbled upon De Quincey. That's the author to bowl a boy over. The Stage-Coach, the Autobiography, the Confessions—I could never get tired of them. I remember buying an ounce of laudanum at a chemist's on London Bridge and taking it home, with the intention of following in the steps of my hero and qualifying to drink it out of a decanter."
Stella Croyle had swung round from the fireplace, and was listening now with parted lips.