Tristram glanced at the leaden sky. "I am afraid that he will not be here then if we have snow, as seems probable. We had better say half-past. You will see that there is a good fire in his room, Mrs. Thwaites? He is ill, you know."
When she had withdrawn he got up from his writing-table and poked his own fire. It was ten o'clock on a morning late in February. In eight or nine hours Dormer would be here. And after dinner they would sit by the fire, and, if his friend were not too tired by the journey, perhaps he could have the relief of talking to him a little—or, if not that, at any rate the comfort of being with him, as on that day at Oxford. He was intensely anxious to see how he was, for about the beginning of December Dormer's headaches had become of alarming severity, and he had been ordered away from Oxford at a day or two's notice. Having spent the vacation and more at his brother's house at Colyton, he had now been to London to consult a well-known physician, and was at this moment on his way to Compton Parva.
Tristram stood a moment with his elbow on the mantelpiece, passed his hand once or twice over his eyes, and with a short, quick sigh went back to his letters.
As a watcher by the crisis of fever is cut off from all else, untouched by the life of every day that surges round the house but is powerless to enter it, unconcerned at great calamities, unresponsive to great joys, so, until Horatia's wedding-day, had it been with Tristram Hungerford. He was watching the last moments, as it were, of the person he loved best on earth. He did not care that the whole country was in a state of ferment, that the agricultural riots were spreading all over the south, and that men were being hanged for them, that there were tumults in London, nor even that in mid-November Wellington and Peel resigned and were succeeded by a Whig ministry under Lord Grey—which meant Reform. If the strain reached its acutest point on the evening that he said farewell to Horatia in the drawing-room at the Rectory, it was nevertheless prolonged, with very little alleviation, until the day that he stood behind her at the altar, and the vigil was over. Some means of relief indeed he had, for he prayed as he had never prayed before, fierce and desperate daily prayers for strength to endure; and he knew, too, at any rate, that his own life and circumstances would be changed by his ordination. More, he even saw, in the interval before the wedding, when Horatia was gone from Compton, a real ray of comfort in that prospect; there was still something he could do in life.
Then had come the marriage in December, the triple marriage. And after that a numbness and a merciful fatigue fell upon him for a while. He had returned with Mr. Grenville to Berkshire and taken up his ordinary occupation. Nearly every day he went over to see the old man, and Horatia's spaniel leapt up at him, and he sat in the rooms which would know her no more. It seemed to him sometimes that he was always there, to such an extent did Mr. Grenville lean on him. But so mortal a weariness had laid hold of him, body and mind, that he could not fully taste the pain. He often fell asleep in the middle of the morning, alarming Mrs. Thwaites. At night he slept long and almost dreamlessly. One waking dream pursued him indeed, for once again he stood behind Horatia in the little French Roman Catholic chapel in King Street, with its memories of banished royalty and the emigration, and in front of him was a figure in white silk and swansdown, with wired orange flowers, that shook when she moved, upon her deep satin bonnet, and with the long veil of a bride. At the time he had derived some self-control by pretending that it was someone else. "Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine..." he heard the words, too, in the unfamiliar pronunciation of the old French priest, and he saw the altar with its four pillars and canopy and some dark picture that he could not distinguish, and the strange little gallery beside it, and the Rector, looking old and bowed, and the Duke ... and another figure. Neither the civil marriage at the Embassy nor the more familiar ceremony at Margaret Chapel remained with him like this ... and this, he supposed, would wear itself off his brain in time; he was too tired to wrestle with it.
This state of blurred consciousness continued till about the middle of December. Then one day, quite suddenly, the fatigue, the mental mist, seemed to lift, and brighter and sharper than before the picture shone before him. And gradually it came to him what it meant. He was in love with another man's wife. He could not present himself for Orders. The straw of comfort to which he had clung was swept away, and now he saw, or thought he saw, the tarnished motives which had made him look forward to his entrance to the priesthood. It was not wonderful that Dormer's coming meant much to him, for he could not write about these things—he was not even sure that he could bring himself to talk about them.
(2)
The two friends each suffered a shock at dinner, for Tristram saw, in the full candle-light, how ill Dormer looked, and Dormer noticed that in two months Tristram had begun to grow grey at the temples.
But they talked during the meal of other things. Once settled in the study before the fire, however, Tristram began without preamble.
"Now, Charles, I want to hear exactly what the doctor says."