Father Adrian hesitated. "A week! Well, let it be so, then. Farewell!"
CHAPTER XXVIII
"ADREA'S DIARY"
"Spring blossoms on the land, and anguish in the heart."
To-night I shall close my diary for a long while, very likely for ever. I am heartily thankful for it. These last few days have been so wretched, full of so much miserable uncertainty, that their record has grown to be a wearisome task. It has ceased to give me any relief; it has become nothing but a burden. How could it be otherwise, when the days themselves have been so grey, so full of shadows and disappointments? You have been a relief to me sometimes, my silent friend; but what lies before me is not to be recorded in your pages.
Twenty-four hours have passed since I made my last entry. It was night then, and it is night now. All that lies between seems phantasmagoric and unreal. I ask myself whether it has really happened; and when the day's events rise slowly up before my memory, I almost fail to recognise them. Yet I have but to close my eyes and lean back, and it all crowds in upon me. In the future I know that this day will stand out clear and distinct from all the rest of my life.
It was early in the morning when I started for Vaux Abbey across the moorland road. So long have I seen this bleak county wrapped in mists and sea fogs that to-day I scarcely recognised it. There was a clear blue sky, streaked with little patches of white, wind-swept clouds, and the sun—actually the sun—was shining brilliantly. How it changed everything! The grey, hungry sea, which I had never been able to look upon without a shudder, seemed to have caught the colouring of the sky, and a million little scintillations of glistening light rose and fell at every moment on the bosom of the tiny, white-crested waves. And the moorland, too, was transformed. Its bare, rock-strewn undulations lost all their harshness of outline and colouring in the sweet, glancing sunlight; and afar off the line of rugged hills, which I had never seen save with their heads wreathed in a cloud of white mist, stood out clear and distinct against the distant horizon, tinged with a dim, purple light.
Why did it all make such an impression upon me, I wonder? I cannot say; but nothing in all my life ever struck so deep a note of sadness. I feel it now; I shall feel it always. There was madness in my blood when I started, I think; but before my walk was half over, it had increased a thousand-fold. Every little sound and sight seemed to aggravate it. I missed the dull sighing and moaning of the wind in the black copses—a sound which had somehow endeared itself to me during these last few days—and in its place the soft murmur of what seemed almost a summer breeze amongst the tall pine-tops stirred in me an unreasonable anger. The face of the whole country seemed smiling at me. What mockery! What right had the earth to rejoice when grief and anxiety were driving me mad? For it was indeed a sort of madness which laid hold of me. I clenched my hands, and muttered to myself as I walked swiftly along. The road was deserted, and I met no one. Once a dark bush away off seemed to me to take a man's shape. I stopped short. Could it be Father Adrian returning to the Abbey? I felt my breath come quickly as I stood there waiting. The idea excited me. I found myself trembling with a passion that was not of fear, and, suddenly stooping down, I picked up a sharp flint, and grasped it tightly between my fingers. Then I moved stealthily on, and the thing defined itself. After all, it was only a bush, not a man at all. I tossed my weapon on one side with a strained little laugh. The sense of excitement passed away, but it left an odd flavour behind it. I found myself deliberating as to what I had meant to do with that stone if it had really been Father Adrian, and if I had succeeded in stealing silently up behind him. Perhaps I scarcely realized my full intention, but a dim sense of it remained with me. It was the development of a new instinct born of this swiftly-built-up hatred. I have my reasons for writing of this. I wish to distinctly mark the period of the event which I have just recorded.