‘Well, for one thing,’ she replied, ‘I know now that you do take your cold bath. I thought you didn’t.’
Had Heaven thundered and shaken off the roof, leaving nothing above but bare sky, Mr. Trimblerigg could not have been more startled than at those words. To poor honest Caroline, the acceptance of the spiritual interpretation of what had happened to him meant, meant necessarily that he had always not merely been good in his own sense of the term, but done the straight thing—taken his baths, and in all quite small things told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
And then, on the top of that, while the shock of it still reverberated through his soul, Caroline let go the thing she had come to tell him.
‘Davidina is coming,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, Jonathan, I didn’t understand then. And when you refused to see a doctor I telegraphed for her.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘Only that you’d got something the matter with your head. She’s coming by the late train. It’s nearly due.’
He sat so still that she grew frightened. She reached out a hand and touched him.
‘Go away,’ he said, ‘let me alone!’
And weeping she got up and left him.
For a long while he sat on, motionless, unable to move. Doubt leapt in on him, engulfed him: blackness—such as he had never known before—was upon his soul. Not Davidina—no, not Davidina herself, whom he had now to expect by the late train—had ever dealt him so devastating a blow. ‘Now I know you take your cold bath: I thought you didn’t.’