No other word was said between them till he had called a cab and placed her in it. Then he said, 'Do not write to me: I will write to you.' He pressed her hand, drew back, and the cab was driven off.
As Petrovitch walked back to his lodgings the sky grew quickly cloudy. It seemed as though the sunshine had gone away with Clare Stanley. By the time he reached Osnaburgh Street the rain was beginning to fall in big heavy splashes on the dusty pavement. He strode up the stairs to his room, locked the door, and flung himself down in the elbow-chair by the fireless grate. The rising wind blew the rain in gusts against the uncurtained window, and the large drops chased each other down the panes and obscured the view of the high houses opposite. All the sweetness had gone out of the weather. Petrovitch noticed it, and felt glad that it was so. He sat quite still and quite silent, his elbow on the arm of his chair, and his forehead on his hand. Now indeed the dark hour was upon Saul. For six months his dream, his hope, his ambition had been to return to Russia. Now he was going at last, and the thought of it was maddening.
He had known that he loved Clare, but he had not known how much he loved her until that moment in the train, and then his sudden knowledge of the strength of his own passion had broken down all his resolutions.
How could he have been such a fool as ever to speak the words which made it impossible for him to see her again? He had not meant to speak them. He could not understand how he had come to speak them. Their utterance was the first unguarded action he had been guilty of for the last ten years. And he had thought with some reason that he could rely on his own cool-headedness and self-restraint. Now it seemed he was mistaken. He was as much the slave of impulse as another—as much as the man who had assumed his name.
It was incomprehensible to him. He quite failed to understand the full force of this new over-mastering emotion. Clare! Clare! The world seemed to mean nothing but Clare. He thought of her apart from all the other facts and circumstances of life, of herself, her face, her eyes, her hair, her voice, her way of holding her head, the movement of her hands when she spoke, and it was a rapture to think of her like this, and to let the thought of her rush over and sweep away all other thoughts, even of his own life's aim. Then slowly came back to him the remembrance of all the realities of his life, and he cursed what seemed to him his degradation. What sort of patriotism was it that the touch of a girl's hand could wither? What principles were they that the look in a girl's eyes could destroy? It was an utterly new experience for him, and he felt as though his patriotism and his faith were dead within him. In that hour he was man first, patriot after. But the hour of weakness was, after all, a brief one. His patriotism was not dead. It had been his master-passion too long for such an easy death to be possible, and as the dusk fell and deepened into night it rose up and met that other passion in the field and vanquished it.
It was late when he rose and lighted his lamp. It shone upon a face white with the struggle he had gone through, but set and determined. He turned to his table and wrote,—
'I love you! I told you so to-day. I did not mean to tell you, and I cannot account for or excuse the impulse that made me do so.
'But, having done so, I cannot ask you to meet me again as comrades meet. It would be embarrassing for you, and for me impossible. I know you do not love me. Perhaps you will even despise me when you learn what has been the temptation I have undergone. To give up Russia—the Cause—the Revolution—everything—and to stay at peace in England, and give my whole soul to the effort to win your love. I am glad to think I am not so unworthy of you as I should have been had I yielded to this—the strongest temptation of my life. I shall leave London to-morrow morning; I cannot stay so near you without seeing you.
'You will think me ungenerous in leaving you without any advice on the subject you desire to be advised on. You shall hear from me before long. Perhaps when I am further from you I shall be better able to write you the sort of letter you will care to have from me. For those who love Liberty, life is made up of renunciations, but no renunciation could be so difficult, so bitter, as is to me the renouncing of this least faint ghost of a chance of winning you. Michael.'
He went out and posted the letter, and when he came in again did not indulge in any more reflections. He busied himself with packing up his belongings, paying his rent, and making all his arrangements for leaving London the next morning.
But when the next morning came, with a fresh radiance of blue skies and sunlight, all his plans were overturned, all his thought unsettled, by this telegram,