So it was all up with me in a few minutes; all my plans for getting inside the shell of my brother's heart vain—or rather, there was nothing inside to get at. Good bye to peace and love, but I will have action: where were my wits that I did not go to India long ago, instead of loitering away the best years of my life in aimless frivolity? Oh! the irremediable past.
In the bitterness of self-reproach I forgot Egerton; why should I be angry with him? he acted according to the dictates of his cold nature. Quietness was torment, and a couple of hours after the above conversation I was steaming to London, en route to my agent, breathless to be doing something—anything.
CHAPTER X.
ADIEU.
London at the close of November! Can the force of human imagination conceive anything half so gloomy and dispiriting? And certainly the dreary weeks I spent there at this period have ever ranked first in my remembrance of wretchedness: the damp, drizzling, foggy condition of animate and inanimate nature—the deserted streets haunted by long strings of decrepid placard bearers whose rheumatic forms seemed bowed under the huge capitals setting forth Mons. Jullien's concerts d'hiver, &c. My days were pretty equally divided between my lawyer and army agent, varied by a good deal of letter writing, and a solitary dinner at the desolate Club. Towards the middle of this purgatorial period, the regiment I was soon to call mine no more got the route for Canterbury; and Burton, like a trump as he was, came up to town to hear a fuller account of my troubles than a letter could give, and to see the most he could of me before I started to the land of military promise. He was a true-hearted fellow, and the sincere, unpretending interest with which he entered into my plans—I will not say hopes, for God knows I felt little then—did me more real good, and drew me more out of myself than the most elaborate efforts at consolation could have effected. Finally, when just about to leave me one night after a long talk over my affairs, and half out of the room, he observed, "You know, old fellow, I have always been prudent, and if a few hundred pounds would be of any use to you, I would be glad of a little higher interest—they only pay two and a half at present—and the whole thing might lie over until you get some prize money in India, when I will be down on you inexorably for the compound interest, principal, and all. Now do not stir, I know my way down; we will talk it over to-morrow."
He was away before I could say a word.
"Come," thought I, as I turned to the fire, "it is worth while to bear the crosses of this world of ours, when it contains even one such fellow as that to leaven the whole lump."
Yet not even to Burton could I bear to talk of the bitter struggle it cost me to part with Kate Vernon as little more than a common acquaintance. It was weakness in me to think of it, and (I am glad I can record so much good of myself) it was a source of sincere rejoicing to me when I reflected that Miss Vernon, at all events, could not suffer from the painful regret I felt gnawing my troubled spirit.