"Nice and fresh, sir; only picked a few hours ago."
Only picked a few hours ago! You plunge your face in them as into cold water, and they too are cool and damp like the cheeks of your little mistress. Like her they have come at last to your long and patient waiting.
CHAPTER III
I can bear no longer these futile speculations of my mind. For months past I have tried to keep them under subjection, but it is impossible to do so any more. I must have word of Clarissa. Is she happy? Have I misjudged that young man? Perhaps that evening when I saw him in the restaurant was only a momentary lapse of conduct. Maybe I have done him an injury and she is happy after all.
But no matter how often I put these questions to myself, they return again unanswered. I have an obstinate belief that she could not be happy with him. Sometimes I think it is this uncertainty about Clarissa which is inducing in me a mood, a conviction—the conviction that I have about run the length of my tether and there is but little left for me but to snap it and have done with the business altogether.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that a man should earn his meal before he eats it, deserve his sleep before he takes it and, above all, justify his existence that he may live. Now I find myself putting the question to my mind twenty times a day—how in the name of Heaven do I justify mine? It is unanswerable, or, rather, I can swear it too well. I do not justify it at all. Had I been of any service to Clarissa, it might have seemed different. But through my interference, I was only the means of spurring her destiny to its end. Certainly Bellwattle intervened, but that was all on my account. Had I not gone to Ballysheen, she would never have persuaded that poor child to rush so recklessly to meet her fate.
Once or twice I have written to Bellwattle, making inquiries. But I hear nothing that can be of much account. She tells me in letters wonderfully misspelt, but in words that are indeed graphic to me, how the roses are doing, of the baskets full of sweet peas that she picked every morning all through the summer. Yet of Clarissa, she gives me no report, except that the Miss Fennells say how they receive letters from her, telling them of her excitements in London and how happy she is in her new life.
I misdoubt these letters in the bottom of my heart. They do not ring true. So at last I have made up my mind to take a definite course of action. I am going to the house in Chelsea, the address of which was given me by Miss Teresa that Sunday afternoon before I left Ballysheen. If by this step I gain no definite news of her, then I shall hazard one final chance. I shall go and call upon Mrs. Farringdon, that married sister of the Miss Fennells whose address Bellwattle has discovered for me. If from her I can elicit nothing, then—it will be, as Peter Pan so wisely says, "a great adventure."
Having thought all this out, quite calmly and collectedly, I called Dandy.
"What'll be done with you, old man?" I asked.