"And did you?" she exclaimed, in a kind of eager suspense.
Hillyard shook his head.
"The taste was too unpleasant. I drank about half an ounce and threw the rest away. I was saved from that folly."
Stella Croyle turned again to the fire.
"Yes," she said rather listlessly.
Yet Hillyard might almost have become a consumer of drugs, such queer and wayward fancies took him in charge. It became a fine thing to him to stay up all night just for the sake of staying up, and many a night he passed at his open window, even in winter time, doing nothing, not even dreaming, simply waiting for the day to break. It seemed to him soft and wrong that a man should take his clothes off and lie comfortably between sheets. And then came another twist. When all the house was quiet, he would slip out of a ground-floor window and roam for hours about the lonely roads, a solitary boy revelling even then in the extraordinary conduct of his life. There was in the neighbourhood a footpath through a thick grove of trees which ran up a long, high hill, and, midway in the ascent, crossed a railway cutting by a rustic bridge.
"That was my favourite walk, though I always entered by the swing-gate in fear, and trembled at every movement of the branches, and continually expected an attack. I would hang over that railway bridge, especially on moonlit nights, and compose poems and thoughts—you know—great, short thoughts." Hillyard laughed. "I was going to be a poet, you understand—a clear, full voice such as had seldom been heard; my poems were all about the moon sailing in the Empyrean and Death. Death was my strong suit. I sent some of my poems to the local Press, signed 'Lethe,' but I could never hear that they were published."
Stella Croyle laughed, and Hillyard went on. "From the top of the hill I would strike off to the west, and see the morning break over London. In summer that was wonderful! The Houses of Parliament. St Paul's like a silver bubble rising out of the mist, then, as the mist cleared over the river, a London clean and all silver in the morning light! I was going to conquer all that, you know—I—
"'Silent upon a peak of Peckham Rye.'"
"I wonder you didn't kill yourself," cried Stella.