‘To my father’s! Ah! what a son I would have been to him now, in his extreme need! . . . And he will not let me! Lancelot, is it impossible to move him? I do not want to go home again . . . to live there . . . I could not face that, though I longed but this moment to do it. I cannot face the self-satisfied, pitying looks . . . the everlasting suspicion that they suspect me to be speaking untruths, or proselytising in secret. . . . Cruel and unjust!’
Lancelot thought of a certain letter of Luke’s . . . but who was he, to break the bruised reed?
‘No; I will not see him. Better thus; better vanish, and be known only according to the spirit by the spirits of saints and confessors, and their successors upon earth. No! I will die, and give no sign.’
‘I must see somewhat more of you, indeed.’
‘I will meet you here, then, two hours hence. Near that house—even along the way which leads to it—I cannot go. It would be too painful: too painful to think that you were walking towards it,—the old house where I was born and bred . . . and I shut out,—even though it be for the sake of the kingdom of heaven!’
‘Or for the sake of your own share therein, my poor cousin!’ thought Lancelot to himself, ‘which is a very different matter.’
‘Whither, after you have been—?’ Luke could not get out the word home.
‘To Claude Mellot’s.’
‘I will walk part of the way thither with you. But he is a very bad companion for you.’
‘I can’t help that. I cannot live; and I am going to turn painter. It is not the road in which to find a fortune; but still, the very sign-painters live somehow, I suppose. I am going this very afternoon to Claude Mellot, and enlist. I sold the last of my treasured MSS. to a fifth-rate magazine this morning, for what it would fetch. It has been like eating one’s own children—but, at least, they have fed me. So now “to fresh fields and pastures new.”’