“I feel,” he said, “that I owe Mr Valkenburg a like explanation; but I understand that he has left his house?”
“Yes, yes,” said the dealer. “He is gone, O, yes!—to Kimberley. He would be much amused.”
“He is a friend of yours? And no doubt a gentleman of the highest reputation. I don’t know how to excuse my visit; it was unpardonable.”
“I do not understand,” answered the other. “You have said nothing to give offence. For Valkenburg, he would appreciate your excellent intentions as I do, and, were he at home, would give you, I am sure, all the information you desire. That Lamb’s Agency has the claim to much privilege, Mr Balm.”
There seemed no conscious irony in his voice or in his fixed smile.
“It is good of you to put it in that way,” said Gilead. “I can only repeat my apologies. Good morning, Mr Hamlin.”
“Good-morning,” answered the dealer, without moving from where he stood.
As Gilead ran down the stairs he met a telegraph boy coming up. In his hurry he collided with the youth and almost bowled him over.
“That illustrates my fatuity,” he thought, as he went on his way. “In trying to put one Postal official on his legs I knock down another.”
He felt considerably depressed—a state of mind to which the weather in its especial degree contributed. The day had opened with a brooding menace of fog—a threat amply justified in the sequel. Hour by hour, as the morning wore on, the squalid cloud had drooped and thickened, until now, at one o’clock in the afternoon, the street lamps were all alight and the shops blazing like dull furnaces. So motionless and so heavy grew the atmosphere that to breathe became a physical consciousness, and one almost felt the process going on in one’s lungs of selection and rejection, with a gasp now and again over a mistaken choice. If all the world, according to the poet, had been a stage, nature could not have come more equal to the occasion with a mise-en-scène of cloud-castles and a ‘make-up’ pencil better adapted to paint every eye with a sooty rim.