CHAPTER LII
"Les âmes dont j'aurai besoin,
Et les étoiles sont trop loin;
Je mourral dans un coin."
How Hugh shook off Lady Newhaven when she followed him out of the Palace he did not know. There had been some difficulty. She had spoken to him, had urged something upon him. But he had got rid of her somehow, and had found himself sitting in his bedroom at the Southminster Hotel. Anything to be alone! He had felt that was the one thing in life to attain. But now that he was alone, solitude suddenly took monstrous and hideous proportions, and became a horror to flee from. He could not bear the face of a fellow-creature. He could not bear this ghoul of solitude. There was no room for him between these great millstones. They pressed upon him till he felt they were crushing him to death between them. In vain he endeavored to compose himself, to recollect himself. But exhaustion gradually did for him what he could not do for himself.
Rachel had thrown him over. He had always known she would, and—she had.
They were to have been married in a few weeks; three weeks and one day. He marked a day off every morning when he waked. He had thought of her as his wife till the thought had become part of himself. Its roots were in his inmost being. He tore it out now, and looked at it apart from himself, as a man bleeding and shuddering looks upon a dismembered limb.
The sweat broke from Hugh's forehead. The waiting and daily parting had seemed unbearable, that short waiting of a few weeks. Now she would never be his. That long, ever-growing hunger of the heart would never be appeased. She had taken herself away, taking away with her her dear hands and her faithful eyes and the low voice, the very sound of which brought comfort and peace. They were his hands and eyes. She had given them to him. And now she had wrenched them away again, those faithful eyes had seared him with their scorn, those white hands, against which he had leaned his forehead, had thrust him violently from her. He could not live without her. This was death, to be parted from her.
"I can't, Rachel, I can't," said Hugh, over and over again. What was any lesser death, compared to this, compared to her contempt?
She would never come back. She despised him. She would never love him any more. He had told her that it must be a dream that she could love him, and that he should wake. And she had said it was all quite true. How sweetly she had said it. But it was a dream, after all, and he had waked—in torment. Life as long as he lived would be like this moment.
"I will not bear it," he said, suddenly, with the frantic instinct of escape which makes a man climb out of a burning house over a window-ledge. Far down is the pavement, quiet, impassive, deadly. But behind is the blast of the furnace. Panic staggers between the two, and—jumps.