“That is the truth. I am an old man and I have seen what altitudes the want of gold can abase, and what impossible things it makes possible. In any adversity gold can find friends.”
“I shall count every half-penny after Blume and Otis.”
“Be not too strict—too far east is west. You may lose all by demanding all.”
Then the two men spent several hours in going over their accounts, and during this time no one called on Rem and he received no message. When he returned home he found affairs just as he had left them. “So far good,” he thought, “I will let sleeping dogs lie. Why should I set them baying about my affairs? I will not do it”—and with this determination in his heart he fell asleep.
But Rem’s sleep was the sleep of pure matter; his soul never knew the expansion and enlightenment and discipline of the oracles that speak in darkness. The winged dreams had no message or comfort for him, and he took no counsel from his pillow. His sleep was the sleep of tired flesh and blood, and heavy as lead. But the waking from such sleep—if there is trouble to meet—is like being awakened with a blow. He leaped to his feet, and the thought of his loss and the shame of it, and the horror of the dishonourable thing he had done, assailed him with a brutal force and swiftness. He was stunned by the suddenness and the inexorable character of his trouble. And he told himself it was “best to run away from what he could not fight.” He had no fear of Hyde’s interference so early in the morning, and once in Boston all attacks would lose much of their hostile virulence, by the mere influence of distance. He knew these were cowardly thoughts, but when a man knows he is in the wrong, he does not challenge his thoughts, he excuses them. And as soon as he was well on the road to Boston, he even began to assume that Hyde, full of the glory of his new position, would doubtless be well disposed to let all old affairs drop quietly “and if so,” he mused, “Cornelia will not be so dainty, and I may get ‘Yes’ where I got ‘No.’”
He was of course arguing from altogether wrong premises, for Hyde at that hour was unconscious of his new dignity, and if he had been aware of it, would have been indifferent to its small honour. He had spent a miserable night, and a sense of almost intolerable desertion and injury awoke with him. His soul had been in desolate places, wandering in immense woods, vaguely apprehended as stretches of time before this life. He had called the lost Cornelia through all their loneliness, and answers faint as the faintest echo, had come back to that sense of spiritual hearing attuned in other worlds than this. But sad as such experience was, the sole effort had strengthened him. He was indeed in better case mentally than physically.
“I must get into the fresh air,” he said. “I am faint and weak. I must have movement. I must see my mother. I will tell her everything.” Then he went to his mirror, and looked with a grim smile at its reflection. “I have the face of a lover kicked out of doors,” he continued scornfully. He took but small pains with his toilet, and calling for some breakfast sat down to eat it. Then for the first time in his life, he was conscious of that soul sickness which turns from all physical comfort; and of that singular obstruction in the throat which is the heart’s sob, and which would not suffer him to swallow.
“I am most wretched,” he said mournfully; “and no trouble comes alone. Of all the days in all the years, why should Madame Jacobus have to take herself out of town yesterday? It is almost incredible, and she could, and would have helped me. She would have sent for Cornelia. I might have pleaded my cause face to face with her.” Then angrily— “Faith! can I yet care for a girl so cruel and so false? I am not to be pitied if I do. I will go to my dear mother. Mother-love is always sure, and always young. Whatever befalls, it keeps constant truth. I will go to my mother.”
He rode rapidly through the city and spoke to no one, but when he reached his Grandfather Van Heemskirk’s house, he saw him leaning over the half-door smoking his pipe. He drew rein then, and the old gentleman came to his side:
“Why art thou here?” he asked. “Is thy father, or Lady Annie sick?”