“But I CAN’T say good-bye to my mother,” he went on, with a piteous look. “If I tried to say good-bye to her, I must tell her all. I’d break down in the attempt. I’ll write to her from the Cape. It’ll be easier so. She won’t feel it so much then.”
“From the Cape!” Colonel Kelmscott exclaimed, drawing back in horror. “Oh, Granville, don’t tell me you’re going away from us to Africa!”
“Where else?” his son asked, looking him back in the face steadily. “Africa it is! That’s the only opening left nowadays for a man of spirit. There, I may be able to hew out a place for myself at last, worthy of Lady Emily Kelmscott’s son. I won’t come back till I come back able to hold my own in the world with the best of them. These Warings shan’t crow over the younger son. Good-bye, once more, father.” He wrung his hand hard. “Think kindly of me when I’m gone; and don’t forget altogether I once loved Tilgate.”
He opened the door and went up to his own room again. His mind was resolved. He wouldn’t even say good-bye to Gwendoline Gildersleeve. He’d pack a few belongings in a portmanteau in haste, and go forth upon the world to seek his fortune in the South African diamond fields.
But Colonel Kelmscott sat still in the library, bowed down in his chair, with his head between his hands, in abject misery. A strange feeling seemed to throb through his weary brain; he had a sensation as though his skull were opening and shutting. Great veins on his forehead beat black and swollen. The pressure was almost more than the vessels would stand. He held his temples between his two palms as if to keep them from bursting. All ahead looked dark as night; the ground was cut from under him. The punishment of his sin was too heavy for him to bear. How could he ever tell Emily now that Granville was gone? A horrible numbness oppressed his brain. Oh, mercy! mercy! his head was flooded.
CHAPTER XXII. — CROSS PURPOSES.
At the Gildersleeves’, too, the house that day was alive with excitement.
Gwendoline had thrown herself into a fever of alarm as soon as she had posted her letter to Granville Kelmscott. She went up to her own room, flung herself wildly on the bed, and sobbed herself into a half-hysterical, half-delirious state, long before dinner-time. She hardly knew herself at first how really ill she was. Her hands were hot and her forehead burning. But she disregarded such mere physical and medical details as those, by the side of a heart too full for utterance. She thought only of Granville, and of that horrid man who had threatened with such evident spite and rancour to ruin him.