I stopped suddenly, looking stupidly about me.
“Where am I?—Who am I?—Dead!”
CHAPTER XV.
THE LETTER IN THE BOOK
I wanted above all things to be alone; to re-order my disordered thoughts; to marshal into some sort of coherence the fantastic figures which ran riot in my brain. I felt like some stunned animal turning to creep away and bury itself in shadow and solitude. The clack of the train in my head was like the worry of a screw shaft to a sea-sick passenger. I had to adapt all my reflections to its mechanic monotony. I could not detach my thoughts from those regular beats. They even assumed to my mind presently a definite measurement. A thought was exactly three inches long, and the wheels tapped it out, tapped it out to one endlessly repeated pattern.
I was horribly, ungraciously apprehensive of running across Johnny Dando in Footover. The vision of his round beneficent face would rise like an obtrusive moon over the troubled waters of my soul. To gain time for self-communion before he learned of my return was my most feverish desire. I was even, truth to tell, wishing the poor dear boy out of my way altogether. There was no longer room in my philosophy for even this gentle farceur.
But he did not cross my path, and I succeeded in reaching my cold hermitage unobserved. There was no fire in it this doleful evening—no sign of any feminine grace or thought for me. I had to make out my own comforts—lay my grate, provide my own meal. Well, that was nothing new; nor was it any new discovery that a passing indulgence often makes a spoilt content. But I confess I was peevish at having only myself to help myself again.
However, I persisted, and, after feeding ravenously on meats I had brought with me, for I was fairly famished, I took a book, haphazard and for form’s sake, from the shelf, lit my pipe, and sat down before the glow to excogitate the moral and practical effect I was called upon to give to an amazing revelation.
As to that, it was patent at once that it had thrown all the machinery of my life out of gear. The questions of love, duty, resentment, retribution must all be unpieced and readjusted, to suit a new point of view. I had no longer, it appeared, true relations with the old. My position was become one of independence; my attitude one of hard triumphant aloofness. Only the mystery of my being was deepened, not resolved. If my mother’s baby had died, I could not be my mother’s son. That, paradoxically, was the postulate. Then, if not hers, whose son was I, and for what inexplicable reason had she undertaken the risk and responsibility of acknowledging me for her own? That there had been foul play somewhere—trickery, fraud, monstrous imposition—was very plain, I thought. My mission, if it had proved abortive in one direction, had been deadly prolific in another. How to wrench truth from the maze of lies!
The wildest theories flashed into my mind, only to be flouted. Was it possible that Lady Skene could have done this donna Quixotic thing for a friend—have imposed on her husband as her own, in some fit of Evangelical Samaritanism, the fruit of a poor sister’s frailty? Out of the question. She was utterly truthful, by temperament and religion. If, on a single occasion, she had let a misunderstanding pass by default, she had had not only the sanction but the encouragement of her Church to justify her. Then Pugsley, at least, believed I was her son, and, as certainly, in all things she believed what Pugsley believed. Granting which, one must grant her innocence of any partnership in a fraud which had apparently imposed upon her, the principal, as it had imposed upon him the unwitting agent.
Yet, had it imposed? or was she, after all, a practised queen of guile—a Lamia, with the serpent in her blood? I thought of her villainous antecedents; I thought of the old obscene harpy down in Lambeth; and my heart would take cold at the thought, insisting that she knew the truth, that she must know it, and that therein was confessed the real secret of her antipathy to me.