“And so my suspicion is confirmed,” thought Tuke; and made his way to the vestibule.
Walking on the stilts, so as to speak, of a sort of incensed exaltation, he issued from the theatre to find a wet sleet falling. The loaded flakes hissed in the torches of the link boys; the whole pavement resounded with the clink of pattens.
“And here is the appropriate wet blanket,” muttered our friend, “to the bed of my own making. I will e’en back to broiled bones and a noggin of punch by the fire.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
There is a curious anomaly about the way in which a self-confidence, impervious to the stabs of ill-fortune, may be paralyzed in a moment by the little prick of a snub irresponsible. Now, I would not go so far as to say that the sang-froid shown by Mr. Tuke over his virtual dismissal by Miss Royston represented the real state of his feelings; or that he did not find his appetite for a certain fruit stimulated by his disappointment of it. But, without doubt, the sting that most rankled for the moment in his vanity was that tart little rebuke administered to him by the aristocratic carline in the theatre-lobby. It was absurd, it was inexplicable—but so it was. His sense of injury in the greater matter was quite overcrowded by his feeling of humiliation in the lesser. That was a little snake, but it swallowed all the rest—so elastic is a proud stomach.
Perhaps it was all very beneficial to him. No doubt it was too much his way to affect a good-humoured tolerance of destiny; to repudiate responsibility, in speech or act, on the strength of a certain genial creed of fatality that assumed itself independent of the laws of obligation. To have that much of the vagabond in one, that one moves serenely indifferent to conventional restrictions, is excellent; but to insist upon one’s vagabondage is to be a didactic vagabond; and that is intolerable. For it is to assume that orthodox folk must accept vagabondage as the superior condition, which, being orthodox, they cannot.
Therefore it was that, upon the morning following his visit to the theatre, our gentleman started—as he had obstinately resolved he would do—upon his homeward journey, quite truculent with a sense of grievance.
There was little in the prospect about him that served to otherwise than confirm his depression. Winter, it was evident, was asserting itself with a despotic and merciless rigour that was deaf to all considerations of humanity. The sleet of the previous night had frozen into and made long icy crevasses of the road-ruts; the throat of the wind was hoarse with cold; the grey of utter lifelessness stretched from earth to sky—a grey that no fury of the stiff blast could rend or discompose.
Each hour linked itself to the next with a bolt of iron as, his teeth set to the driving chill, he urged his long way forward. The road clanked under him; the scarlet nostrils of his straining horse palpitated like blown coals against a background of ashes. He did not much care to think of anything but his own miserable discomfort; and in that he took some hard satisfaction, as if by enduring it he were shaming the callous soul who had bidden him away from his cosy fireside in the “Adelphi.”
It was at this climax of his meditations that humour and hunger ventured upon a little roguish assault on his epigastrium. Had the attack failed, he had been other than the man of this history. It did not, by any means. He sighed, drew himself up, twinkled over the collapse of his pondered heroics, broke into a laugh, half-vexed, half-jocund, and fairly plunged into that illuminating thought of the æsthetic value of appetite to a free man.