Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico (a portion, written early in the year 1772, in his rooms at Griffin’s, Curzon Street)
Home in England once again, if home it can be called, this set of hired chambers, so dreary within, with outside the lowering fog and the unfamiliar sounds that were once so familiar. It is all strange, after eight years’ exile; and the grime, the noise, the narrow limits, the bustle of this great city, weary me after the noble silence, the wide life, at Tollendhal.
It was with no lightening of my thoughts that I saw the white cliffs of old England break the sullen grey of the horizon, with no patriotic joy that I set foot on my native soil again, but rather with a heavy, heavy heart. What can this land be to me now but a land of exile? All that makes home to a man I have left behind me.
I hardly know why I have resumed the thread of this miserable story. God knows that I have no good thing to narrate, and that this setting forth, this storing, as it were, of my bitter harvest of disappointments, can bring no solace with it. And yet man must hope as long as life lasts; and the hope keeps springing up again, in defiance of all reason, that, somehow, some day, we shall meet again. Therefore I write, in order that, should such a day come, she may read for herself and learn how the thought of her filled each moment of my life since our parting; that she may read how I have sought her, how I have mourned for her; that she may know that my love has never failed her.
This it is that heartens me to my task. Moreover, all else is so savourless that I know not how otherwise to fill the time. I have been here five weeks; there are many houses where I am welcome, many friends who would gladly lend me their company, many places where young men can find distraction of divers kinds and degrees; but I have not succeeded in bringing myself to take up the new life with any zest: I had rather dwell upon the past in spite of all its bitterness, than face the desolation of the present.
It was on the third day of the great storm that the pen fell from my hand at Tollendhal, and for four and twenty hours more that self-same storm raged in violence. One word of my old servant’s had brought me on a sudden to a definite purpose. I was full of eager hope of tracing her, of finding her, once it were possible to start upon the quest. For the gale which kept me prisoner must have retarded her likewise; and even with two days’ start, I told myself, she could not have gone far upon her road.
But I reckoned without the difficulties which the first great snowfall of the year, before the hard frost comes to make it passable for sledging, was creating for us in these heights where the drifts fill to such depth. Day and night my fellows worked to cut a way for me down to the imperial road; and I worked with them, watched, encouraged them, and all, it seemed, to so little purpose that I thought I should have gone mad outright. The cruel heavens now smiled, now frowned, upon our work, so that, between frost and thaw and thaw and frost, the task was doubled, and my prison bars seemed to grow stronger instead of less.
In this way it came to pass that it was full ten days from the time that she had left Tollendhal that I was at length able to start forth in pursuit.