He made his way, by devious streets whose old book-stalls for once beckoned him in vain, to Bloomsbury and the Museum. A kind of idea had grown up unobtrusively in the background of his thoughts, that possibly he might find Vestalia there. It assumed the definite outlines of an expectation as soon as he entered the building. When he stood in the reading-room itself, and began a systematic scrutiny of its radiating rows of readers, it was with as much confidence as if he had come by appointment. The failure to discover her disturbed and annoyed him. He made a slow tour of the inner circle, then another of the broader outer ring, and suffered no one of the professed students to escape his examining eye.
What a crew they were! He had never realised it before. His hostile inspection laid bare the puerile devices of the young fools who came by concerted arrangement, took down books at random, and, sitting close together, carried on clandestine flirtations under the sightless mask of literature. He glowered with a newly-informed vision at the extraordinary females whom no one had planned to meet—the lone women with eccentric coiffures and startling costumes, who emerge from heaven knows where, and mysteriously gather here in quest of something which it seems incredible that even heaven should be able to define. Observing now the vacuous egotism of their flutterings and posturings in other people’s way, the despairing clutch at public attention made by their outlandish vestiture and general get-up, David’s thoughts settled grimly upon the fact that there were lands, the seats of ancient civilizations, where superfluous female children were drowned at birth. Here, he reflected, with sullen irony, we teach them to read and write, and build and stock a vast reading-room for them instead. His mood preferred the Ganges to the Thames.
There was more pathos in the spectacle of another class of habitual attendants—the poor, shabby, hungry serfs of the quotation merchant. Mosscrop knew the genus by sight, and in other times had had amusement from their contemplation. How a sombre rage possessed him as he beheld them toiling unintelligently, hopelessly, under the lash of starvation. He watched one of the slave-drivers for a while, a short, red man, of swollen spiderish aspect, who moved about keeping these sweated wretches at their toil, now doling out a few pence to one who could remain erect unnourished not a minute longer, and who slunk out forthwith with a wolfish haste, now withering some other with whispered reproaches of threats. Mosscrop longed to go and break this creature’s neck, or at the very least to kick him, with loud curses and utmost contumely, from the room.
He went out himself, instead, animated by a freshening spirit of resentment at the futility of existence. From sheer force of habit, he dawdled in front of shop-windows, turned over hooks and prints in one after another of his accustomed resorts for second-hand merchandise, and otherwise killed time till the dinner hour. But he did it all without any inner pretence that the process afforded him consolation. Even when he met some fellows from the Temple, in Chancery Lane, and joined them in a series of visits to ancient bars in the vicinity, where they all stood at wearisome length, and argued with intolerable inconsequence about wholly irrelevant matters over their drinks, his thoughts maintained a moody concentration upon the theme of his personal unhappiness. The stray contributions which he offered to the general conversation were all of an acrid, not to say truculent, character. He had a sort of dour satisfaction in the utterance of offensive gibes and bitter jokes. Twice the threat of an altercation arose, in consequence of these ill-natured comments of his, and David sullenly welcomed the imminent quarrel; but the intervention of the others, without any help from him, cleared the atmosphere again. Even the peacemakers, however, evinced the opinion that he was behaving badly, and nodded cheerful adieus when at last he declared that they were a parcel of uninspired loons, with whom he marvelled to find himself consuming valuable time. They lifted their glasses at him mockingly as he strode away, with the gleam of an unexpressed “good riddance!” in their eyes.
The consciousness that he had made himself disagreeable to these fellows had its uses as a counter-irritant to his inner self-disgust. It rendered solitude at least a trifle more supportable. He bought a novel, and read it beside his plate at Simpson’s, where the heavy joints and weighty old ale just fitted his mood. The book was one which the papers were talking of for the moment. David reflected grimly as he skimmed the opening chapters that Vestalia had asked him why he didn’t write a Scotch novel. They were all the vogue, she said, and while the fashion lasted, it was nonsense for any Scotchman to pretend that he could not profitably occupy his leisure time. He had replied, with some flippancy, that his imaginative powers might compass the construction of a tale, hut were unequal to the task of inventing also a whole dialect to tell it in. How, as the whim returned to him, his fancy parodied a title for this unborn work. How would “A Goddess, Some Merely Ordinary Fools and Lord Drumpipes” do?
Ah! that Drumpipes! David paid his bill, lit a cigar, and sallied forth, suddenly informed with the notion of going to the Inn, and having it out with the Earl. He doubled up his fists as he hurried along.
The top floor at Dunstan’s was wrapped in darkness. Mosscrop knocked and kicked first at “Mr. Linkhaw’s” door to make sure that no one was in, then opened his own, and struck a light. The apartment wore still in his eyes the chill desolation of aspect which he remembered from the morning. There had been a change in the weather, and the suggestion of a fire was in the damp air. He put on his loose jacket and slippers, recalling sadly as he did so the vision he had beheld only twenty-four hours before, of that pretty little ermined footgear on the fender beside his, in front of the glowing grate. He brought out the decanter and a glass, and sighed deeply.
Then all at once he caught sight of something white in the letter box. In the same instant he was tearing open a stamped envelope, addressed in a large, strange hand which yet he knew so well, and excitedly striving to gulp in the meaning of the whole written page before him, without troubling to read the lines in their sequence. Yes, it was from her, and—yes, it contained words of kindness and even of tenderness which shone brilliantly forth here and there from the context. He pulled himself together, and walking over to the light, began resolutely at the beginning.
“Dear Mr. Mosscrop,—I hope you were not very much disappointed at finding me gone this morning, or rather, I hope you were a little disappointed, but will not be so any longer when you get this explanation. I don’t know either that it can be called an explanation, for it doesn’t seem to me that I am at all able to explain even to myself, much less to you.