In this final phase of their duel, he had at last determined upon a desperate solution of what had grown to be a menace; he would tell her frankly that they must part; it followed that he would receive his letters, and he hoped, by the aid of that tact which he justly believed himself to exercise, to prevent a scene which could only be painful to them both.
With the afternoon of Saturday he set off once more to the Malden Arms.
His spirit as he went was oppressed and confused. I have said that Cosmo was and is (if he will forgive me the phrase) pursued by the accidents of his childhood. His body, too bulky and too slow, suffered from the necessity of these daily journeys; their inconclusive irritation preyed also upon his clear, but retiring mind. For no reason, save that care breeds care, and that his general tone had fallen with the strain of these days, he saw his future blackly as he went wearily up the hill of Mallersham in the summer evening.
A healthy man of his position and inheritance does not consider his debts, for instance; he himself had never given them a thought till now; he had seen them vaguely at the back of his mind, two or three hundred pounds (£250 was the figure at which he averaged them in more careful moments):—he had dismissed them for more immediate things.
But this evening their list seemed interminable! His father’s hearing of them, which he had put off to some future moment of success or necessity, seemed suddenly grown terrible—a thing not to be approached. He recalled this and that obligation which were almost matters of honour, and he got colder as he recalled them. He began to imagine how men whom he knew spoke of him in his absence. He felt as it were enmeshed and held, though hitherto no such imaginary follies had oppressed him in all his youth—so much can one note of friction enfeeble all the soul.
In a wiser moment he would have known that rasp and depression of this sort would weaken him in negotiation. It did indeed weaken him now when he met Hermione. He so conducted his demand that a woman of less strength might have been guilty of a quarrel. She fell to no such weakness. She told him what she had told him a hundred times—all that his letters were to her. If he himself chose to begone, she would retain them as the only thing remaining to her.
In all this her voice was finely self-possessed, she spoke as of a property in land, a fortune; and as she did so, discovered an unexpected exactitude and dignity of demeanour. She seemed—perhaps from affectation—unmoved by his sudden gesture and his assurance that he would not return. The letters were still her theme, and their nature, or at least her interpretation of them, were the last words he heard from her lips as, much more clearly than he wished, she still called after him across the twilight. He would not turn his head. He left her and pushed homeward, taxing his strength unwittingly, and attempting a desperate hope that she would indeed so cherish his writing that he should hear neither of it nor of her again.
He reached college in utter weariness. June was not yet ended; the weather was still cold; he lit a fire for company, and stared at it for an hour or more, in that terror of the future which will oppress men of his temperament upon any considerable accident.
His large, fair, Viking body seemed to grow weak and to sink upon itself, as he sat there tortured by thought. His face, though heavy, was too young for this care to alter it; but all energy had disappeared from his eyes: and his brain, in a kind of lethargy, sought no solution.
The letters and his debts, his debts and the letters, mixed in a confused nightmare. He sat up as though determined to shake off a mere obsession, and to seek refuge in reality.