‘How can one console him?’
‘Nohow. It isn’t to be done.’
‘What can I say to him, my poor lad?’
‘Nothing, if you’ll believe me. I can tell you I shall not speak of it. There are things no one ought to meddle with, unless they are opened out to one. I know why he sent for me—it was in order that he might not have to enter into the whole business again. He wanted it done with, sealed up, that I might know he had no brother any more. You can’t very well talk to a man of a relation he hasn’t got, and I shall keep my mouth shut.’
‘I will try,’ said Dr. Rowntree; ‘but if I see him looking very miserable, I don’t think I can keep quiet.’
‘You won’t see Michael looking miserable, I can tell you that. My time is up,’ added Roger, looking at his watch. ‘I must go back to my work.’
He left the house, with the thought just come into his mind, ‘After all, I shall have to speak to him. I don’t see how how I can stay in this shop any longer, after the treatment he has had.’
He turned into the office, but it was with difficulty that he succeeded in giving any attention to his work; for in his mind’s eye he had the image of Michael, seated alone in his desolation in that wretched room, where the wretched scene of the morning had taken place. It seemed to Roger that the worst blow had befallen Michael which by any possibility could overtake him—which idea serves sweetly to illustrate his own extreme ignorance of life, and of the protean forms which calamity and misfortune can assume; also of the marvellously elastic nature of the human creature, and of that part of it, be it brain, or heart, or soul, or whatsoever it may in reality be, which suffers.
Roger Camm, repeating to himself the half-forgotten Greek of his quotation about the goddess Calamity, never dreamed for a moment but that she had stayed her course. Surely her feet had pressed with sufficient weight upon the head which she had selected as her standpoint! Could his spiritual eye have pierced that veil, filmy, and yet dense, which envelops us as we move to and fro on this earth, and seen the guiding powers about Michael, he would have perceived still hovering amongst them a dark form with a woebegone countenance—her of the tender feet yet.
He returned to Dr. Rowntree’s from his work, and, having no heart to amuse himself in any way outside, sat with a book, to which he gave but a divided attention, wondering the while whether Michael would go to Magdalen that night, or wait till the morrow; and wondering likewise whether she would be of any use to him in the crisis.