"Will 'ee 'ave a lamp then, zur?" asked the old lady.
"Not yet," said Leicester; "I'm going out for a walk."
For an hour he tramped, until the day had gone.
"I must make up my mind," he said: "the old life is impossible now. What shall I do? Pull down the shutters, or shall I——?"
He entered the cottage again, and was met by the kindly presence of the old lady of the house.
CHAPTER XV
THE CYNIC AND THE COUNTRYWOMAN
Radford Leicester stayed at the cottage among the Devonshire moors for several days. A more lonely place could not be well imagined. The cottage itself stood in a little dell where trees grew, and a moorland stream babbled. Early spring flowers were to be seen there, and the smell of the bursting new life of bracken and heather and willow bush was sweet beyond words; but the view from the cottage was such as one only finds in a moorland district. For miles nothing was to be seen but a wild waste of nearly uninhabited land. The few cottages were occupied by those who had reclaimed strips of waste land, and obtained a scanty living thereon. A month or two later the whole scene would be aglow with the bloom of furze and heather; but now it was grim and grey and, under a cloudy sky, forbidding. But Leicester was not sorry for this. The countryside, the loneliness, fitted in with his mood. He felt that the past was destroyed, and that the things which were once possible to him had come to an end. What had the future for him? What was he to do? That was the question he had to face.
Immediately after he had realised that Olive Castlemaine was lost to him for ever, he had conceived wild schemes of revenge. He wanted to make Olive suffer as he had suffered; he swore that he would humble her pride to the dust, and that he would win the wager which for the present had lost him the woman he had loved. But that was all over now. He had become degraded in the eyes of the nation. He had no respect for the morality of the political world; but however low it might be, there was a kind of moral standard which people demanded in their representatives. They were not troubled because he had drunk too much, it was that he had become intoxicated at the wrong time. He had actually appeared on a public platform in a state of drunken imbecility. He had given the opponents of his party the whip hand, and he had in all probability lost his party the election. That was his sin, and it would take years for them to forget it.