BOOK VI
VICTORY
CHAPTER I
THE WEAVER HOUSE AGAIN
THERE is a dramatist hidden in every one of us. We like to cast ourselves as heroes, as heroines, as villains of the piece. Make-believe is one of the fundamental instincts. It is human nature to construct a drama about our lives; it is also very human to seize dramatic situations.
There was a good deal of the dramatic in Wint. When he left his home that night, Muldoon at his heels, he was acutely conscious that his life was broken. He had lost everything. He had lost father, and mother; and he had lost Joan. They were irrevocably gone. Furthermore, he was beaten in his fight. There could be no question of this. Hardiston would overwhelm him. There was left for him in this world—nothing.
Wint was enough of a boy to take a keen delight in the tragedy of this; he was enough of a boy—or enough of a dramatist, for the two things are in many ways the same—to emphasize his situation, bring out the high lights, vest it in the trappings of drama. He did not think of himself as a hero, for having sacrificed everything for Hetty; he did not think of that phase of the situation at all. He had done that because it was the inevitable consequence of events. It was the only thing he could do. He took no credit to himself for the doing. But he did picture himself as broken or destroyed; and as he walked, more or less aimlessly, it was natural that his thoughts should cast back through the months to those other days when he had fallen low. Thus he remembered the Weaver House, and Mrs. Moody.
There seemed to him something appropriate and fitting in the idea of returning to the Weaver House this night. He had risen out of it; he would return to it. It was in such surroundings, now, that he belonged.
He turned that way.