The lad he employed in his office was run over by a cab one slippery day, and all but killed. Piers visited him in the hospital, thus seeing for the first time the interior of one of those houses of pain, which he always disliked even to pass. The experience did not help to brighten his mood; he lacked that fortunate temper of the average man, which embraces as a positive good the less of two evils. The long, grey, low-echoing ward, with its atmosphere of antiseptics; the rows of little white camp-beds, an ominous screen hiding this and that; the bloodless faces, the smothered groan, made a memory that went about with him for many a day.
It strengthened his growing hatred of London, a huge battlefield calling itself the home of civilisation and of peace; battlefield on which the wounds were of soul no less than of body. In these gaunt streets along which he passed at night, how many a sad heart suffered, by the dim glimmer that showed at upper windows, a hopeless solitude amid the innumerable throng! Human cattle, the herd that feed and breed, with them it was well; but the few born to a desire for ever unattainable, the gentle spirits who from their prisoning circumstance looked up and afar how the heart ached to think of them! Some girl, of delicate instinct, of purpose sweet and pure, wasting her unloved life in toil and want and indignity; some man, whose youth and courage strove against a mean environment, whose eyes grew haggard in the vain search for a companion promised in his dreams; they lived, these two, parted perchance only by the wall of neighbour houses, yet all huge London was between them, and their hands would never touch. Beside this hunger for love, what was the stomach-famine of a multitude that knew no other?
The spring drew nigh, and Otway dreaded its coming. It was the time of his burning torment, of imagination traitor to the worthier mind; it was the time of reverie that rapt him above everything ignoble, only to embitter by contrast the destiny he could not break. He rose now with the early sun; walked fast and far before the beginning of his day's work, with an aim he knew to be foolish, yet could not abandon. From Guildford Street, along the byways, he crossed Tottenham Court Road, just rattling with its first traffic, crossed Portland Place, still in its soundest sleep, and so onward till he touched Bryanston Square. The trees were misty with half-unfolded leafage birds twittered cheerily among the branches; but Piers heeded not these things. He stood before the high narrow-fronted house, which once he had entered as a guest, where never again would he be suffered to pass the door. Irene was here, he supposed, but could not be sure, for on the rare occasions when he saw Olga Hannaford they did not speak of her cousin. Of the course her life had taken, he knew nothing whatever. Here, in the chill bright morning, he felt more a stranger to Irene than on the day, six years ago, when with foolish timidity he ventured his useless call. She was merely indifferent to him then; now she shrank from the sound of his name.
On such a morning, a few weeks later, he pursued his walk in the direction of Kensington, and passed along Queen's Gate. It was between seven and eight o'clock. Nearing John Jacks house, he saw a carriage at the door; it could of course be only the doctor's, and he became sad in thinking of his kind old friend, for whom the last days of life were made so hard. Just as he was passing, the door opened, and a man, evidently a doctor, came quickly forth. With movement as if he were here for this purpose, Otway ran up the steps; the servant saw him, and waited with the door still open.
"Will you tell me how Mr. Jacks is?" he asked.
"I am sorry to say, sir," was the subdued answer, "that Mr. Jacks died at three this morning."
Piers turned away. His eyes dazzled in the sunshine.
The evening papers had the news, with a short memoir—half of which was concerned not with John Jacks, but with his son Arnold.
It seemed to him just possible that he might receive an invitation to attend the funeral; but nothing of the kind came to him. The slight, he took it for granted, was not social, but personal. His name, of course, was offensive to Arnold Jacks, and probably to Mrs. John Jacks; only the genial old man had disregarded the scandal shadowing the Otway name.
On the morrow, it was made known that the deceased Member of Parliament would be buried in Yorkshire, in the village churchyard which was on his own estate. And Otway felt glad of this; the sombre and crowded hideousness of a London cemetery was no place of rest for John Jacks.