When Braine returned to his bare little room after his suicide, he was in a strange, paradoxical mood. His thought was intensely introspective, and yet, with a whimsical perversity, his mind seemed specially alert to external objects, and full of fantastic imaginings concerning them.
The bareness of the room impressed him, and he likened it to a cell in some prison.
"Never mind," he said to himself, "I may have to sleep in a cell some time, and the habit of living here will come handy."
Then, with a little laugh, in which there was no trace of amusement, he stood before his desk, and added:
"But I believe they don't put strips of worn out carpet by the prison beds; and I never heard of a cell having a desk in it surmounted by empty collar-boxes for pigeon holes. Let me see—six times five are thirty. What an extravagant fellow I have been, to use up thirty boxes of paper collars in a year! Ten in a box, that's three hundred—almost one a day! I might have done with half the number by turning them, as I had to do at college before paper collars came in. Psha!" and he seemed to spurn the trivial reverie from him as a larger recollection surged up in his mind, and he began to pace the little room again with the purposeless tramp of a caged wild beast, whose memory of the forest is only a pained consciousness that it is his no more.
The June twilight faded into darkness, and the evening gave place to midnight, but the ghost-walk went ceaselessly on.
In those hours of agonizing thought, the young man—to be young no more henceforth—recalled every detail of his life with a vividness which tortured him. He was engaged, unwillingly, in obedience to a resistless impulse, in searching out the roots of his own character, and finding out what forces had made him such as he knew himself to be.
In the process he learned, for the first time, precisely what sort of man he really was. He saw his own soul undressed, and contemplated its nakedness. One's soul is an unusual thing to see en déshabillé, and not always a pleasing one.
He remembered a letter his mother had written him at college—that mother of half Scotch descent, and touched with Scottish second-sight, who had silently studied his character from infancy, and learned to comprehend it not without fear. He could repeat the letter word for word. It had given him his first hint that he had a character, and a duty to do with respect to it. He had cherished the missive for years, and had read it a thousand times for admonition. Alas! how poor a thing is admonition after all!
"There is one danger point in your character, my son"—he recalled the very look of the cramped words on the page of blue-ruled letter paper—"where I have kept watch since you lay in my arms as a baby, and where you must keep watch hereafter. You have high aims and strong convictions, and you mean to do right. You will never be led astray by others—you are too obstinate for that. If you ever go astray, you must take all the blame on your own head.