“I cannot please you by leaving England, but there are much simpler ways of giving you what you wish. I send your portrait. It is a long time since I have dared to look at it, and I cannot do so now. May you be happy!”
He enclosed Isabel’s picture, without taking it from the envelope in which he always carried it about with him; then addressed the letter to her and posted it.
He walked towards the railway station. Ah, there was the inn at which he lost his purse; he stood and looked at it for a moment. He looked, too, towards the branching of the old and the new roads to Winstoke. He had chosen the old road that day; it was picturesque. Even so it looked now, descending into the hollows, leafy, grass-grown, peaceful. To what had it led him!
He found at the station that there would not be a train for nearly two hours. But he dreaded waiting; motion was imperative. He would walk back again to Winstoke station, by the way he had come, and catch the train there. His head did not ache so badly now. Though he had eaten nothing all day, hunger he felt none, but much thirst. He remembered a stream on the way, and hastened that he might reach it.
The stream he had in view ran across the lane; he made his way into the field, lay down, and drank at a convenient spot. The water had an ill taste, or seemed to have, but it refreshed him. Still, he found it hard to rise again; a heaviness tempted him to rest here. His head lay upon his arm, and for a time he dozed.
Then up and on again, or he would miss the train. The last half-mile he walked by the railway. He was not yet in sight of the station when the train he had hoped to take came along. He watched it with a strange sort of indifference, as if incapable of the effort of feeling annoyed. Nothing greatly mattered, it seemed as if nothing henceforth would greatly matter. Still more singular, he found himself confused with the idea of the future, unable to make it a subject of conscious speculation. His mind was occupied with a fixed idea that his life had been, as it were, broken off short, and had a ragged edge; no forward continuity seemed possible.
It was a possession; he could not think of the details of his present, scarcely suffered from the thought of what he had done; his trouble took the shape of an intellectual difficulty. Wrestling with it he walked straight on, past the station, and in a direction away from Winstoke. His mental distress was the same in kind as that we experience when striving with wearied faculties to see clearly into a mathematical problem, a dogged exertion of the brain, painful, acharné, but accompanied with a terrible desolation of the heart. He would half forget what had brought him to this pass, and set to work to review events. There were no passionate outbreaks; a dead weight lay upon his emotions, and vitality was in the brain alone. He did not even pity himself; the calamity which crushed him was too vast.
He was conscious again of a torturing thirst, and the object of his progress became to discover a wayside inn where he might drink. He came to one at last, and entered it very much as any pedestrian might have done. What could they give him to drink?—he asked. Beer; no, for beer he had no palate. They had spirits. He diluted two half-tumblers, and drank them off in quick succession. A couple of men were talking in the parlour, discussing politics. One of them jocularly appealed to him, and he replied energetically, laying down the law on a subject which never occupied his thoughts, or had not done for years. Again he set forth, with understanding that he must make for Winstoke station. His limbs were of iron, he had not a sensation of weariness. The sun was no longer shining; there were clouds in the west, and the evening was drawing on. Again with dogged mental effort he clung to the fact that his end was Winstoke station; he did not question but that he was on the right road. On and on, and it grew dusk about him. Presently something shot painfully into his eyes; it was a flash of summer lightning; no thunder followed. He pressed his hands against his head, and moaned a little. The flashes became frequent, and then, of a sudden, the strength of his limbs failed him. He would have to rest, and the grassy edge of the road gave an opportunity. He lay down at full length, and hid his face; the lightning pained him too much.
It was as if he slept, but always with the weight of shapeless woe burdening his heart and brain. He turned at times, and knew that he was lying by the road-side, knew, too, that night was coming on, but was powerless to rise. He talked much and loud, inveighed with forceful bitterness against some one who had done him a wrong, vast and vague. If he could but get one hours quiet sleep; and that cruel tormentor would not suffer him....
The summer lightning ceased, and it grew very dark. Over the meadows swept a warm wind, bearing mysterious voices, wafting sobs and sighs. Then a cloud broke, and rain began to fall....