"I am a man," he said speaking to those unseen shadows, "and what I do, I do!"
The freshness of the air came as a bath of moral cleanliness to his soul; he felt an excitement, too, akin to that of a war horse when scenting the coming battle. To Michael now the whole transaction—to which on the morrow he would affix the seal of his pledged word—was but a mighty combat wherein a powerful weapon would be placed in his hand.
He would at last be able to hit right and left, to be even with that world which had buffeted him, which had scorned his efforts, but allowed his mother to starve.
Aye! He was a turbulent soul; a soul created to fight and not to endure.
And if at moments during that lonely watch above the chimney stacks and roofs of London there came floating to his mind the thought of the girl who was nothing to him, the stranger whom he would so bitterly wrong, then with a proud toss of the head, a joy which literally lighted up his whole being, he would send an unspoken challenge up to those swiftly-flying clouds which tended southwards, towards Paris.
"Go tell her!" he murmured, "that whoever she may be Michael Kestyon will serve her with gratitude and love all the days of his life. On his knees will he worship her, and devote his life to her happiness. And," he added mentally, whilst a quiver of excitement shook his broad shoulders, "tell her that an she desires to be Countess of Stowmaries, even that desire Michael Kestyon will gratify, for he will make her that—tell her—tell her that before next December's snows cover the earth there will be two Countesses of Stowmaries in England: Michael Kestyon's mother and Michael Kestyon's wife."
He did not attempt to go and rest on his miserable couch, but leant for hours up against the window watching the moon slowly drawing its peaceful course along the dark firmament, seeing the fleecy, silvered clouds fly madly across the sky, lashed by the wind into fantastic shapes of witches' heads and of lurid beasts. He watched the roofs and towers of many churches as gradually they were wrapped in the mist-laden mantle of approaching dawn.
He watched until far away above chimney stacks and pointed steeples a feeble rosy glow precursed the rising sun. He was too weary now to think any more, too weary to dream, too weary he thought even to live.
And through the gathering mist it seemed to him that the ghostly spectres of his tumultuous past came to him enwrapped in white palls, monstrous and majestic, towering above mighty London, and that walking slowly in their wake, tottering and shy was his mother, enfeebled by starvation and the wretchedness of her life. She held out emaciated arms to him in a mute appeal for help, whilst the ghosts of the past spoke with unseen lips of all that he had suffered, of the great sorrows and the tiny pin-pricks.
And with every word they uttered his soul sank more and more to rest, and even as his aching head sank down upon his outstretched arms, and his eyes closed in a dreamless sleep, his lips murmured with final defiance: