"Not that door!" cries Essie and runs to him. "Here's the door. Here's the stairs. Look, here's your candle."
He blunders up. He blunders to his room. He extinguishes the candle. Let him have the dark, the dark! He throws off his clothes, tearing them from him as though they were his agonies. God, if he could but tear these tortures so! He flings himself upon the bed and trembles there and clutches there and thrusts the sheet between his teeth to stay him crying aloud. Inchoate thoughts that rend him, rend him! Unmeaning cries that with the sheet he stifles. What, what consumes him now? He cannot name it. What tortures him? He does not know. Writhe, writhe in the bed; and now it is the sea, and now the Infirmary ward, and now the coffee-shop, and now the parlour. Ah, beat down, beat down these torments! Ah, sit up and stare into the darkness and rid the spirit, rid the mind, of all these shapes and scenes that press about the pillow. Has he slept? Is he sleeping? Why suffers he? What racks him? In God's name what? In pity, in pity what?
"Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors: and the King of glory shall come in."
Ah, ah!
CHAPTER III
TRIAL OF MR. WRIFORD
I
He had determined, writhing in those tortures of that night, at daybreak to get out of it. He had promised himself, striving to subdue his mental torments, that early morning, the house not yet astir, should see him up and begone. Sleep betrayed him his promises and his resolves. While he writhed and while he cried aloud to sleep to come and rest his fevered writhings, she would not be won. Towards morning she came to him. He awoke to find daylight, sounds about the house, escape impossible.
His reception at breakfast in the little parlour changed his intention. His reception made the desertion that now he intended immediately he could leave the house as impossible as, now he saw, escape at daybreak had been most base. He found in Mr. and Mrs. Bickers and in Essie not the smallest trace of recognition that his conduct upon the previous evening had been in the smallest degree remiss. He found them proving in innumerable little ways that, as Mrs. Bickers had told him, they liked their lodgers to be "one of us like." Mr. Bickers proposes to walk with him towards Tower House School in order to show him short cuts that will lessen the way by five minutes. Mrs. Bickers inquires if she may go through his bundle to see if any buttons or any darnings are required. Overnight he had been made to put on a pair of Mr. Bickers' slippers. Essie has put a new lace in one of his boots because one, when she was polishing the boots, was "worn out a fair treat." How can he run away from them without paying them in face of such kindness and confidence as all this? "Glad you like bacon," says Essie, helping him generously from the steaming dish she brings from the kitchen; and says to her mother: "Haven't some of our lodgers bin fanciful, though? Oh, we haven't half had some cautions!" and her eyes sparkle and her lips twitch as though her merry mind is running over the entertainment that some of the cautions have given.
No, there can be no desertion of his duties here after this. They trust him. They accept him as "one of us like." Already he is indebted to them. Until the week is out he is penniless and unable to repay them. When his week is up he can thank them and pay them and go. Till then, at whatever cost—and he will stiffen himself for the future; he was ill and overwrought last night—he must stay and earn and settle for the week for which he is committed.