"Less than ten days," I repeated. This was the fifth of the month. "If all goes well. Less than ten days."
Again I passed a sleepless night. A feeling of the utmost loneliness and desolation grew up within me. Less than ten days! And then she would be "safely away" from me. She and Rosemary! There was a single ray of brightness in the gloom that shrouded my thoughts: she had urged me to fly away with her. She did not want to leave me behind to face the perils after she was safely out of them. God bless her for thinking of that!
But of course what little common sense and judgment I had left within me told me that such a course was entirely out of the question. I could not go away with her. I could do no more than to see her safely on her way to the queer little port on the east coast of Italy. Then I should return to my bleak, joyless castle,—to my sepulchre,—and suffer all the torments of the damned for days and weeks until word came that she was actually safe on the other side of the Atlantic.
What courage, what pluck she had! Criminal? No, a thousand times, no! She was claiming her own, her dearest own. The devil must have been in the people who set themselves up as judges to condemn her for fighting so bravely for that which God had given her. Curse them all! ... I fear that my thoughts became more and more maudlin as the interminable night went on.
Always they came back to the sickening realisation that I was to lose her in ten days, and that my castle would be like a tomb.
Of course the Hazzards and the Billy Smiths were possible panaceas, but what could they bring to ease the pangs of a secret nostalgia? Nothing but their own blissful contentment, their own happiness to make my loneliness seem all the more horrible by contrast. Would it not be better for me to face it alone? Would it not be better to live the life of a hermit?
She came to visit me at twelve o'clock the next day. I was alone in the study. Poopendyke was showing Mr. Bangs over the castle.
She was dressed in a gown of some soft grey material, and there was a bunch of violets at her girdle.
"I came to dress your hand for you," she said as I helped her down from Red Ludwig's frame.
Now I have neglected to mention that the back of my hand was swollen to enormous proportions, an unlovely thing.