And although his life was pure, his actions gentle and blameless, it had always been thus to him—a lovely and poetic picture and no more. He had never made a personal application of it to himself. His heart had never been touched, and he had never heard the Divine Voice calling to him.
At the end of a fortnight Hands found that he could stand the strain no longer. His nerves were failing him; there was a constant babble of meaningless voices in his ear which took all the zest and savour from life. His doctor told him quite unmistakably that he was doing too much, that he was not inured to this gaiety, and that he must go away to some solitude by the sea and rest.
The advice not only coincided with his own wishes, but made them possible. A good many engagements were cancelled, a paragraph appeared in the newspapers to say that Mr. Hands's medical adviser had insisted upon a thorough rest, and the man of the moment disappeared. Save only Gortre and the secretary of the Exploring Society, no one knew of his whereabouts.
In a week he was forgotten. Greater things began to animate Society—harsh, terrible, ugly things. There was no time to think of Hands, the instrument which had brought them about.
The doctor had recommended the remotest parts of Cornwall. Standing in his comfortable room at Harley Street, he expatiated, with an enthusiastic movement of his hand, upon the peace to be found in that lost country of frowning rocks and bottle-green seas, where, so far is it from the great centres of action, men still talk of "going into England" as if it were an enterprise, an adventure.
Two days found him at a lonely fishing cove, rather than village, lodging in the house of a coast-guard, not far from Saint Ives.
A few whitewashed houses ran down to the beach of the little natural harbour where the boats were sheltered.
On the shores of the little "Porth," as it was called, the fishermen sat about with sleepy, vacant eyes, waiting for the signal of watchmen on the moor above—the shrill Cornish cry of "Ubba!" "Ubba!" which would tell them the mackerel were in sight.
Behind the cove, running inland, were the vast, lonely moors which run between the Atlantic and the Channel. It is always grey and sad upon these rolling solitudes, sad and silent. The glory of summer gorse had not yet clothed them with a fleeting warmth and hospitality. As far as the eye could reach they stretched away with a forlorn immensity that struck cold to Hands's heart. Peace was here indeed, but how austere! quiet, but what a brooding and cruel silence!
Every now and again the roving eye, in its search for incident and colour, was caught and arrested by the bleak engine-house of some ancient deserted mine and the gaunt chimney which pointed like a leaden finger to the stormy skies above. Great humming winds swept over the moor, driving flocks of Titanic clouds, an Olympian army in rout, before their fierce breath.