CHAPTER XIV.
A CHANGE OF MIND.
Three months later Paul Lessing stood, one morning in March, with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, looking out of his sitting-room window. His eyes rested on the little plot of ground before him, with its borders of snowdrops and crocuses, and the road beyond, along which the village children in their scarlet cloaks hurried to school: a narrow boundary to a narrow life, he told himself—and lonely, since Sally had left him a week or two ago. He was intolerably dull, and Sally's letter, which lay open on the table, brimful as it was of new energies and interests, had set him wondering whether he could continue his present course of life much longer. There was positively no one left in the village, at present, with whom he could interchange an idea.
Mr. Curzon, with whom, in the last three months, he had become fairly intimate, had gone to his new field of work, leaving a blank behind him in every house in the place; his successor had not yet arrived. "And we are not likely to have much in common when he does come," Paul thought, with a smile. May Webster, after manfully fulfilling her purpose of helping in the village until the trouble and distress, brought by the fever, had passed away, had returned to London; and it was little enough that Paul had seen of her whilst she had been there. And that very day Paul had received a letter from Mrs. Webster to tell him that at Michaelmas she wished to vacate the Court, which she now kept on as a yearly tenant.
"It cannot matter to me," Paul said to himself. "In many ways, of course, it is the best thing that could happen." And yet he found himself thinking of nothing but the utter desolation of Rudham, when May's bright presence should be removed from it, when he could no longer hope for a passing glimpse of her in the street.
"I have vegetated down here until I run a risk of softening of the brain," he said aloud. "I must have change. I'll be off to London for a week, put up at my club, see a few of my friends, and unearth Sally in her new quarters."
The thought had scarcely formed itself before he began to carry it into execution: putting together his papers, looking out a convenient train. And, shoving his head inside the door of the Macdonald's sitting-room, he enlisted Mrs. Macdonald's help in the matter of packing.
"Rather sudden, sir, isn't it?" she said, as she knelt upon the floor in the centre of the clothes which Paul had pulled out of his drawers and littered about in hopeless confusion. "It's bad enough to lose Miss Sally, but John and I won't know ourselves when you've gone too."
"It won't be for very long," said Paul, good-humouredly, grateful to discover that anybody would miss him, and careful to suppress the fact that he was dull.
Arrived in London the stir and bustle of the streets was as refreshing to him as water to a thirsty man, and to find himself once more amongst his fellows in the club, where many a man greeted him with a friendly nod, was simply delightful, One friend asked him to dinner that night, another made an appointment for the play on the night following; his presence was demanded at an important political meeting, where he was requested to speak on the labour question. And again the thought forced itself upon him how much better he felt fitted to cope with the masses, and work at the big social problems of the day, than to deal with the individual lives of the people of Rudham. And the parliamentary career for which he longed was absolutely within his grasp, for a seat belonging to his political party was to be vacated in the autumn, and his name was already mentioned as that of the likely candidate; but there was no course open to him but to refuse the offer if it came. It took more means than he had at his disposal to do his duty by Rudham.