“First of all to my own home. I live at present at Chislehurst, and have a house much too big for me. Colonel Stratton will probably be home before Christmas, and we shall make a party. I wish you could make it convenient to join us for a few days.”
“It’s very good of you,” Robert replied with deliberate gratitude. “If all goes according to your expectation, I will come with pleasure.”
They parted the best of friends, looking mutual compliments.
“Now, why couldn’t Isabel be open with me?” mused Mrs. Stratton, after he had gone. “Several things begin to be a little clearer, I fancy.”
“A capital little woman,” meditated Robert, on his way to the station. “I shouldn’t wonder if her friendship prove valuable.”
And all three weeks it rained, rained with scarcely a day’s intermission. If the new road to Salcot was a mere mud-track, the state of the old road can be conjectured; its deep ruts had become watercourses, its erewhile grassy prominences were mere alluvial wastes. The piece of sward before the cottage gradually turned to swamp; the oak torso stood black with drenching moisture, its clinging parasite stems hung limp, every one of its million bark grainings was a channel for rain-drops. Behind, the copse was represented by the shivering nakedness of lithe twigs, set in a dark, oozy bed of decaying leaves and moss and fungi. Sometimes the rain fell straight from a gray sky without a rack feature from end to end, till all Nature seemed to grow of one colour, and the space between morning and evening was but a wan twilight of indistinguishable hours. Sometimes there glimmered at midday a faint yellowness, a glimpse of free heaven athwart thinning vapour, a smile too pale to hold forth promise. Sometimes there came towards nightfall a calling from the south-west, the sky thickened with rolling battalions overflashed at instants with an angry gleam, and blasts of fury drove the rain level with the reeking earth. Then there would be battle till dawn, followed, alas! by no glorious victory of the sun-god, but with more weeping of the heavens and sighing of the worn-out winds.
In spite of the fearful weather, Kingcote walked incessantly. The solitude of his cottage was hideous. Every little familiar sound—the rattling of a window or a door, the endless drip of rain, the wind moaning in the chimney—became to him the voice of a tormenting demon. He loathed the sight of every object around him; the damp odour which hung about the place and greeted him whenever he entered from the open air brought a feeling of sickness; he dreaded the hour of going upstairs to the bare bed-chamber, where the cold seized him as in a grip, and the darkness about his candle was full of floating ghosts. The sound of the rain, as he lay longing for the sleep that would not come, weighed upon his spirit to the point of tears; he wept in his gulf of wretchedness. He could not read; the hours of the day would have been interminable but for the regular walk, which killed a portion of time. And occasionally he could spend an evening at the rectory.
Only a man capable of settling at Wood End as Kingcote had done would have been capable of living thus through these late weeks of the year. It needed a peculiar nature to go through with such self-torment—a nature strangely devoid of energy, and morbidly contemplative. He would not admit to the Vissians that he suffered in any way; he even visited them less often than he otherwise would have done, that he might not appear to seek refuge in their house. Bodily ill-health had much to do with his singular state—ill-health induced by long mental suffering and the unwholesome conditions of his life; it aggravated his moral disorder and made him physically incapable of the step he would otherwise have been driven to. To quit the cottage and return, if only for a time, to London, he had persuaded himself was impossible; whilst Isabel Clarendon lay on her sick-bed he could not go away. During the first two weeks, he himself had fallen little short of grave illness; his nights were feverish: once he found himself standing at the gates of Knightswell, without being able to summon consciousness of his walk from home, the hour being just before dawn. Upon this had followed lassitude; he heard almost with indifference of Isabel’s improved condition, and for a few days did not care to move from his fireside. The fever left him, however, and mental disquietude took its place. A source of misery and exasperation was the number of people he knew to be calling at Knightswell; the multitude of her friends excited his jealousy; he himself was of no account among them, the very least of these people, who made their conventional visits and left their respectable cards, was more to her than he. Even if a voice assured him that it was not so, he refused to listen; the fascination of self-torture will not brook a moment’s consoling. He called twice, at long intervals, partly because it was not decent to neglect the duty, partly because a longing to draw near to her anguished him; but each time he came away maddened with jealous suspicions. The servant had stood across the door, as if to bar his possible entrance, and had replied to his question with supercilious negligence; the very windows of the house had looked upon him with the contemptuousness of a vacant stare. Of such nothings it was his fate to make hours of suffering. The most absurd thoughts possessed him. She would return to the world a changed woman; even if she cared ever to receive him again, it would be with the cold politeness of a slight acquaintance. She would associate him always with that day’s meet, and the thought of him would be always something to dismiss from her mind as painful. A thousand such fantastic webs did he spin in his brain, each an hour’s distress. Yet nothing could have taken him from the neighbourhood. To go now would be to have seen her for the last time, to make her henceforth only a name in his memory, and he felt that death would be preferable to that.
Time lost its reality. Sunday he knew, because of the church bells; of other days he kept no count, one was even as another. But it befel at length that the rain ceased, and the first sunlight which awoke him at his bedroom windows was like the touch of a soft, kind hand. It brought to his mind all pleasant and beautiful things: the sound of her voice, the clear vision of her countenance, the white waving of her’ hand as she rode away, the promise that was in one and all of these. Upon sunlight followed frost; at night-time a dark blue heaven with burnished stars, and the gleaming rime of early hours. The spirit of the healthful air breathed upon him, and gave his blood fresh impulse. He heard that she had left her bed, was all but able to sit up through the day. Might he not before long hope to see her?
One Sunday morning as he sat at breakfast—it was a strange-looking meal, laid out upon a bare deal table, much the kind of breakfast that the labouring men in other cottages sat down to—a shadow passed before the window, and there followed two sharp blows with a stick at his door. It was the postman’s knock; Kingcote started up eagerly to answer. There were only two probable correspondents, his sister and Gabriel, and it was some time since he had heard from either. But the letter which the man put into his hand had travelled a shorter distance; it bore only the Winstoke mark. The handwriting he did not know, but it was a woman’s, and, it seemed to him, written under some infirmity. In his agitation, he made scant reply to the postman’s remark about the weather; yet he noticed that it had just begun to snow, and that the light flakes were silver in sunlight. It was not a letter—a mere note of one side, but it ended with the name of Isabel Clarendon.