Somehow Walter had a sense of relief. He began to dress, and spent some pains on the process. He felt sure Sefton would take care the “Onlooker” should not be seen—before his departure anyhow. During dinner he talked almost brilliantly, making Lufa open her eyes without knowing she did.
He retired at length to his room with very mingled feelings. There was the closing paragraph of the most interesting chapter of his life yet constructed! What was to follow?
Into the gulf of an empty heart
Something must always come.
“What will it be?” I think with a start,
And a fear that makes me dumb.
I can not sit at my outer gate
And call what shall soothe my grief;
I can not unlock to a king in state,
Can not bar a wind-swept leaf!
Hopeless were I if a loving Care
Sat not at the spring of my thought—
At the birth of my history, blank and bare.
Of the thing I have not wrought.
If God were not, this hollow need.
All that I now call me,
Might wallow with demons of hate and greed
In a lawless and shoreless sea!
Watch the door of this sepulcher,
Sit, my Lord, on the stone,
Till the life within it rise and stir.
And walk forth to claim its own.
This was how Walter felt and wrote some twelve months after, when he had come to understand a little of the process that had been conducted in him; when he knew that the life he had been living was a mere life in death, a being not worth being.
But the knowledge of this process had not yet begun. A thousand subtle influences, wrapped in the tattered cloak of dull old Time, had to come into secret, potent play, ere he would be able to write thus.
And even this paragraph was not yet quite at an end.
CHAPTER XXV. A MIDNIGHT INTERVIEW.
Walter drew his table near the fire, and sat down to concoct a brief note of thanks and farewell to his hostess, informing her that he was compelled to leave in haste. He found it rather difficult, though what Lufa might tell her mother he neither thought nor cared, if only he had his back to the house, and his soul out of it. It was now the one place on the earth which he would sink in the abyss of forgetfulness.
He could not get the note to his mind, falling constantly into thought that led nowhither, and at last threw himself back in his chair, wearied with the emotions of the day. Under the soothing influence of the heat and the lambent motions of the flames, he fell into a condition which was not sleep, and as little was waking. His childhood crept back to him, with all the delights of the sacred time when home was the universe, and father and mother the divinities that filled it. A something now vanished from his life, looked at him across a gulf of lapse, and said, “Am I likewise false? The present you desire to forget; you say, it were better it had never been: do you wish I too had never been? Why else have you left my soul in the grave of oblivion?” Thus talking with his past, he fell asleep.