In the first profound depression into which this unforeseen occurrence had plunged him, Wyndham remained totally indifferent to his freedom. His thought in a feeble way reached out, recalling her words, lingering on her crowning confession. Suddenly he laughed out aloud. How much greater the irony of his life than even he had imagined! For the second time he and Lady Betty had come together, only voluntarily to part that they might not disturb the happiness of this other life! How they had tortured themselves; how Lady Betty had sought deliberate martyrdom, staying near him only long enough to school him to perfect loyalty to Alice! "Whilst I was fretting my heart away," his lips murmured, "lest I should wound her with a chance word, she was vibrating again towards her own kind, and was planning her retreat. Surely the gods are pulling the strings and making us poor puppets dance for their amusement!"
And then he thought of the Hampstead street miles away, where he had passed so many years of his life in suffering and degradation; and the sense of its distance helped him. Were he still in the old studio, the sense of the Robinsons' house within a stone's throw would have been intolerable. He would hardly have dared to set foot out of doors for fear of the painful accident of stumbling up against one of the family. He desired no further explanations and apologies. He shuddered at the very idea. Here at least he could take shelter silently within his own pride.
And the thought of his pride made him rise up again, and pace to and fro vigorously. It was beneath him to admit that that had been wounded. But he came to a standstill, and the blood rushed to his temples at the abrupt remembrance that all the prosperity and success that must still remain his had come to him through the Robinsons. Were not the humiliating evidences here before his eyes? This charming house and studio, the successful pictures hung in the galleries, the money at his bankers, the promise of unlimited treasure yet to flow into his coffers, the acclamation of the world and his social lionising—how much of all this would have been achieved without the timely co-operation of the Robinsons? He staggered in moral agony under the burden of good they had heaped on him so lavishly.
Nothing of course could be undone. Wisest to acquiesce silently, and start forward afresh from the point at which he stood. But since it was now only the end of May, and the best of the season was yet to follow, he felt that to stay in London would be intolerable.
The world seemed to swarm with people, all intent on chattering about his affairs, on discussing and misunderstanding this sensation in the life of the lion of the season. A lovely titbit for the social gossips to relish! He could not possibly meet people, shake their hands, answer their stupid questions, listen to the hateful sympathy of the more intimate. He must shut up the house and fly from London. But where could he hide himself for the time?
He resumed his pacing to and fro, sometimes perambulating the studio to vary his movement. So far he was under the influence of the first excitement attendant on the rupture. Whatever his astonishment at having been ousted in the affections of a woman by a man whom he had more or less despised, whose rivalry he had brushed aside as easily as a cobweb; the bare idea that a broken engagement should figure in his life was so distasteful that it made the wound to his mere vanity a secondary matter. He could not at once extricate his mind from the contemplation of these immediate bearings of the event. His relation to Lady Betty, indeed, was present to him, but he had not yet turned the flood of his thought in that direction.
In the reaction of feeling, however, when the first sting and shock had somewhat lightened, it was natural for his whole soul to turn to Lady Betty longingly; not with the joyous impulse of one unexpectedly free to claim his true comrade, but like a bruised child to find relief for his hurt. But how to reach her again he did not know. So thorough had been their sacrifice that he had even promised never to write to her. Besides, letters would only follow her if sent through a certain banker, whose name she had withheld from him. And though now he felt that circumstances absolved him from the promise, he did not care that such a letter as he must write, once he put pen to paper, should go to her father's deserted house, and thence be tossed about the world in perhaps a futile pursuit, with the possible fate of being read in a dead-letter office, and finally returned to him. He would wait awhile. Perhaps, if the gossip got abroad, it might by some circuitous route arrive even as far as Lady Betty's ears, and then no doubt she would announce her whereabouts to him. The pressing problem before him was to decide on his own plans for the immediate present.
How stale and tired he was! How terribly he had toiled these past months, sustained by he knew not what mysterious energy. It seemed almost as if he had exerted a supernatural strength, and the work he had accomplished might well have claimed double the period. And now, something had suddenly gone snap. He was finished; a mere hollow shell of a man.
His mind turned again towards other climes and other skies. It seemed so long since he had crossed the Channel; so many years indeed that it was hateful to count them. It reminded him too much of the big slice of his life, the years of his prime, that had been so miserably sterile.
But his face brightened as his thought played again amid the haunts of his early manhood. Ah, those were happy times—the work in the schools, the discussions in the café, the pleasant camaraderie, the freedom to laugh, to feel master of one's own soul. The brilliance and green avenues of Paris beckoned him; his blood beat pleasurably. And then of course there was his portrait of Lady Betty in the Salon. What better shrine for a pilgrimage!