“Well,” concluded Roland, rising, and gathering up his letters, which he had deposited upon a side table, “if this is not a nice part of the world to live in, I don’t know what is! Arthur Channing kept down under Galloway’s shameful injustice; Jenkins making out that things are all over with him; and I driven off my head doing everybody’s work! Good night, Jenkins. Good night, Mrs. J. That was a stunning tea! I’ll come in again some night, when you have toasted muffins!”
CHAPTER XLIX. — A CHÂTEAU EN ESPAGNE.
A keen wind, blowing from the east, was booming through the streets of Helstonleigh, striking pitilessly the eyes and cheeks of the wayfarers, cutting thin forms nearly in two, and taking stout ones off their legs.
Blinded by the sharp dust, giving hard words to the wind, to the cold, to the post-office for not being nearer, to anything and everything, Roland Yorke dashed along, suffering nothing and no one to impede his progress. He flung the letters into the box at the post-office, when he reached that establishment, and then set off at the same pace back again.
Roland was in a state of inward commotion. He thought himself the most injured, the most hard-worked, the most-to-be-pitied fellow under the sun. The confinement in the office, with the additional work he had to get through there, was his chief grievance; and a grievance it really was to one of Roland’s temperament. When he had Arthur Channing and Jenkins for his companions in it, to whom he could talk as he pleased, and who did all the work, allowing Roland to do all the play, it had been tolerably bearable; but that state of things was changed, and Roland was feeling that he could bear it no longer.
Another thing that Roland would perhaps be allowed to bear no longer was—immunity from his debts. They had grown on him latterly, as much as the work had. Careless Roland saw no way out of that difficulty, any more than he did out of the other, except by an emigration to that desired haven which had stereotyped itself on the retina of his imagination in colours of the brightest phantasy—Port Natal. For its own sake, Roland was hurrying to get to it, as well as that it might be convenient to do so.
“Look here,” said he to himself, as he tore along, “even if Carrick were to set me all clear and straight—and I dare say he might, if I told him the bother I am in—where would be the good? It would not forward me. I wouldn’t stop at Galloway’s another month to be made into a royal duke. If he’d take back Arthur with honours, and Jenkins came out of his cough and his thinness and returned, I don’t know but I might do violence to my inclination and remain. I can’t, as it is. I should go dead with the worry and the work.”
Roland paused, fighting for an instant with a puff of wind and dust. Then he resumed: