He was shaken again. Some wild rebellion was rising in him, and vainly Lady Betty tried to calm him with pleading—even with tears. But she revealed only the more her own anguish.
At last she had command of herself again, and put a stern inflection into her voice.
"For Alice's sake you must conquer yourself. No, let it be for my sake. I put it as the test of your love for me. Otherwise I shall believe that your love is selfish."
"I promise I shall conquer myself, but I must have time."
"You make me terribly afraid—you may wound her by a chance word."
"That is impossible. Her mind is serene—no word of mine shall disturb it."
But Lady Betty's fears were by no means allayed. She wrote him long letters, imploring him to keep command of himself, else she would regret bitterly that they had ever met again. They had both fought this terrible battle: they were neither of them emerging unscathed, but their wounds and hurt were the price of honourable victory. She was sure of herself; but was he—the man!—to shrink back when the supreme moment came? The thought of loyal duty accomplished would bring equanimity hereafter.
"Ah, if all were only a dream!" he exclaimed sadly, as he lay thinking of nights. And then he would try to believe that he had not met Lady Betty again, had never even heard of her since her wedding-day. He had never made the acquaintance of the Robinsons, had never set foot in their great ugly house at the corner. Were not all these things the fancies of a disordered imagination, and was he not still here in Hampstead, in his narrow iron bed up on the gallery? To-morrow he would jump up and make his miserable breakfast as usual, would think of working without being able to raise a hand, and would potter away the hours. And at six in the evening he would see his prosperous neighbour from the City go past with noiseless, gentle step, bearing a plaited rush-bag with a skewer thrust through it. Yet what a relief to throw off the illusions of these latter days, and find himself again as of old, free of all the tangle; even though the problem of bread still faced him, and the vista of hopeless days stretched away endlessly!
Alas! the morning light, filling his panelled bedroom and revealing to his eyes the many luxuries of these prosperous days, testified only too convincingly to the reality of recent developments.
And yet, as he turned up the well-known Hampstead street of an evening on his way to the Robinsons, he would still struggle again to recover the illusion that the old days were yet. Approaching the house as it loomed in the near distance through the wintry mist, he would imagine himself supremely unconcerned with it. And then he would stop outside his own former door, and fumble in his pocket a moment as if to find the key. Like lessons learnt after the mind is set, all these later accretions to his existence were ready to drop away, to have a shadowy relation to him. It made him realise with astonishment how easily he might cut the Robinsons out of his life, and proceed as if he had never known them. His bond of obligation was more real to him than the people to whom he was bound!