Mr Burden pressed the spring: it chimed him half-past two, and then three little tinkling minutes. Mr Burden did not lie down. He still sat up there in bed, his left hand on his chest, his right hand upon the pillow supporting him: and still he stared at darkness.
There are moments, under the brooding fixity of the night, when the mind loses foothold. The man was old, his infirmity of purpose in the single matter of this new investment I have described; his doubts, which were the product of a morbid atmosphere rather than of a reasoned view; his fear, which had become an irritable fear.
All these the night increased. The magnitude of the sum he risked, the still greater peril of the adventure into which that day would lead, appalled him. He was in great dread and disquiet of mind, and he felt, though he did not know it, like those young poetasters who put into their verse the longing to be in other times and away from something evil in the modern world. It was a mood of intense weakness, due, I believe, to illness alone, but it affected all his attitude during the ensuing days.
After some twenty minutes of this suffering he slept again, uneasily, dreaming confused dreams; he woke again in the grey light for a moment, his mind troubled by some phantasm of a quarrel waged in sleep, and he tossed into the morning. By seven he could rest no more. He got up and dressed; day and activity began to invigorate his mind. The quiet confidence of Cosmo at breakfast, the leader in The Times upon the corruption of Russia, the cat upon the rug—all the familiar things of home strengthened him, like sacraments, for the thing that he had to do.
Only once that morning did his miserable hesitation return. It was when he found himself in the station at Norwood, standing, not on the platform for the City, but opposite, on that for Victoria. The novelty of the thing again disturbed him; but he was brave. He shook off the influence, and, when he stepped out at his journey’s end, the movement and the vigour of the streets revived in him a better mood. His confidence increased as he stepped through the summer morning; he entered Pall Mall briskly, in the attitude of expectation and advance, and he went up the steps of the Plantagenet Club with something as near triumph in his heart as men of that sober and even temper can feel.
This was not an end for which he had worked; it came as a kind of unexpected reward for a life that had been regular, industrious, and, in its fundamental emotions, consistently patriotic. Of the many feelings which men have mixed in them upon those great days when they are admitted to take an active part in the expansion of our power, two were supreme in him at that moment. He felt, with a freshness almost of youth, as though he were himself about to create a new thing on the map of the world.
He felt the warmth which cannot but accompany a prospect of additional fortune.
From these two sources there proceeded an exultation which was not ignoble, and which went forward with a conquering movement, lifting his heart as he entered the great doors.
Within those doors some indefinable cold breath did strike him. Even in that present mood of his, he could not shake off an impression of strangeness. The furniture was not what he knew; it was recent; it belonged to a more glorious but certainly a less commodious age.
It was bent into the strangest patterns; fantastic curves met here and there in the faces of young unhappy women. There was applied to it by screws moulding which would have required the utmost art of the sculptor had it not consisted of composition.