At the end of the week he and Mactier went home, and the inactivity and the loneliness and the sleeplessness grew greater than before.
There was no face of his own kind to greet him here, in Scotland; the Camerons were his nearest neighbors, and the Camerons were away—Tom in Aberdeen. There was no one to help him, even if they could, to beat back the blind despair that threatened him with mental and with moral death.
One day he ordered out the hounds and rode across country until the fields and trees and fences became blurred together by the touch of twilight. He returned mud stained and mortally weary and stalked into the dining room and over to the sideboard, where he locked his table wines. He took out a decanter and hunted around for a glass, and carried both into the library, and sat down. Then he poured some of the wine and swallowed it at a mouthful. He filled the glass again and drank the liquor leisurely, lounging back in his chair with a sigh of content. After all, he declared, there was nothing like a bracer when a chap was fagged out.
By and by, he slipped down a little in his chair and stretched his legs, still encased in their mud-stained boots, straight out in front of him and went to sleep. When he awoke it was quite dark, and he sat still, staring through the uncurtained window into the night, and conscious of a delicious languor. Then as his faculties became more acute and the old spectre returned to haunt him, he instinctively stretched forth his hand in the blackness and fumbled for the decanter and the glass. He drunk deeply once, twice, three times—and when he raised the glass for the fourth time his hand shook and there was an odd rushing sound in his head.
Suddenly he sat forward in his chair, pushed the glass and decanter from him roughly and flung out his arms across the table. The odd rushing sound subsided, and he became aware that the wine was dripping from the table to the floor, where he had overturned the decanter.
He did not refill it, and the sideboard remained unlocked—and empty.
So the days passed. He would climb up into the eyrie, as he had done as a child and listen to the beating sea below. Once the sea had sung to him of undiscovered lands, whose shores it touched, bearing the message back to him; it had sung of wealth and fame gained by the sword—it was by the sword always—and it had beaten and beaten, and sung of all that he would one day like to be; and of what some day he would be and achieve. Once it had sung of love—of its mystery and the essence of its life—
Now—
He would crawl to the edge of the crag and peer over into the white foam, holding on to the edge until the old boyish dizziness came back; but unlike in the old days, there was never a woman's face in the foam now. What right had he to look for a woman's face in the foam!
