"Mr. Bomford is very fond of money," she continued. "He is fonder of money, I think, than he is of me. And then," she added, her voice sinking to a whisper, "there is Garden Green. Of course, I do not know much about these things, but I suppose if you really wanted to, and spent a great deal of money, you could buy your freedom, couldn't you?"
The air seemed full of jangling discords. He closed his eyes. It was as though a shipwreck was going on around him. His dream was being broken up into pieces. The girl with the fair hair was passing into the shadows from which she had come. She called to him across the lawn as he hurried away, softly at first and then insistently. But Burton did not return. He spent his night upon the Common.
CHAPTER XIX
A BAD HALF-HOUR
Burton slept that night under a gorse bush. He was no sooner alone on the great unlit Common with its vast sense of spaciousness, its cool silence, its splendid dome of starlit sky, than all his anger and disappointment seemed to pass away. The white, threatening faces of the professor and Mr. Bomford no longer haunted him. Even the memory of Edith herself tugged no longer at his heartstrings. He slept almost like a child, and awoke to look out upon a million points of sunlight sparkling in the dewdrops. A delicious west wind was blowing. Little piled-up masses of white cloud had been scattered across the blue sky. Even the gorse bushes creaked and quivered. The fir trees in a little spinney close at hand were twisted into all manners of shapes. Burton listened to their music for a few minutes, and exchanged civilities with a dapple-breasted thrush seated on a clump of heather a few yards away. Then he rose to his feet, took in a long breath of the fresh morning air, and started briskly across the Common towards the nearest railway station.
He was conscious, after the first few steps, of a dim premonition of some coming change. It did not affect—indeed, it seemed to increase the lightness of his spirits, yet he was conscious at the back of his brain of a fear which he could not put into words. The first indication of real trouble came in the fact that he found himself whistling "Yip-i-addy-i-ay" as he turned into the station yard. He knew then what was coming.
After the first start, the rapidity of his collapse was appalling. The seclusion of the first-class carriage to which his ticket entitled him, and which his somewhat peculiar toilet certainly rendered advisable, was suddenly immensely distasteful. He bought Tit-bits and Ally Sloper at the bookstall, squeezed his way into a crowded third-class compartment, and joined in a noisy game of nap with half a dozen roistering young clerks, who were full of jokes about his crumpled dinner clothes. Arrived in London, he had the utmost difficulty to refrain from buying a red and yellow tie displayed in the station lavatory where he washed and shaved, and the necessity for purchasing a collar stud left him for a few moments in imminent peril of acquiring a large brass-stemmed production with a sham diamond head. He hastened to his rooms, scarcely daring to look about him, turned over the clothes in his wardrobe with a curious dissatisfaction, and dressed himself hastily in as offensive a combination of garments as he could lay his hands upon. He bought some common Virginian cigarettes and made his way to the offices of Messrs. Waddington and Forbes.
Mr. Waddington was unfeignedly glad to see him. His office was pervaded by a sort of studious calm which, from a business point of view, seemed scarcely satisfactory. Mr. Waddington himself appeared to be immersed in a calf-bound volume of Ruskin. He glanced curiously at his late employee.
"Did you dress in a hurry, Burton?" he inquired. "That combination of gray trousers and brown coat with a blue tie seems scarcely in your usual form."
Burton dragged up a chair to the side of his late employer's desk.