Just before morning, however, in the cold before the dawning, Edgar had a real dream, a dream of sleep, and not of waking, so vivid that it came into his mind often afterwards with a thrill of wonder. He dreamt that he saw standing by him the figure of her who had touched his heart in his earlier years, of Gussy, who might have been his wife had all gone well, and of whom he had thought more warmly and constantly, perhaps, since she became impossible to him, than when she was within his reach. She seemed to come to him out of a cloud, out of a mist, stooping over him with a smile; but when he tried to spring up, to take the hand which she held out, some icy restraint came upon him—he could not move, chains of ice seemed to bind his hands and arrest even his voice in his throat. While he struggled to rise, the beautiful figure glided away, saying, “After, after—but not yet!” and—strange caprice of fancy—dropped over her face the heavy veil of the young sister who had excited his curiosity, and who was seated in the other corner of this same hard wooden bench, just as Edgar, struggling up, half awake, found that his railway wrapper had dropped from his knees, and that he was indeed almost motionless with cold.
The grey dawn was breaking, coldest and most miserable hour of the twenty-four, and the other figures round him were nodding in their sleep, or swayed about with the jarring movement of the carriage. Strange, Edgar thought to himself, how fancy can pick up an external circumstance, and weave it into the fantastic web of dreams! How naturally his dream visitor had taken the aspect of the last figure his musing eyes had closed upon! and how naturally, too, the physical chill of the moment had shaped itself into a mental impossibility—a chain of fate. He smiled at the combination as he wrapped himself shivering in his rug. The slight little figure in the other corner was, he thought, awake too, she was so perfectly still. The people on the other side dozed and nodded, changing their positions with the jerking movement of restless sleep, but she was still, moving only with the swaying of the carriage. Her veil was still down, but one little white hand came forth out of the opening of her black cloak. What a pity that so pretty a hand should not be given to some man to help him along the road of life, Edgar thought to himself with true English sentiment, and then paused to remember that English sisterhoods could take no irrevocable vows, at least, in law. He toyed with this idea, he could not tell why, giving far more attention to the veiled figure than half-a-dozen unveiled women would have procured from him.
Foolish and short-sighted mortal! He dreamed and wondered at his dream, and made his ingenious little theory and amused explanation to himself of the mutual reaction of imagination and sensation. How little he knew what eyes were watching him from behind the safe shelter of that heavy black veil!
CHAPTER IX.
Alone.
Edgar did not well know where to go on his arrival in London. He knew nothing about London except in its most expensive regions, and the only place to which he could direct the driver of the cab into which he jumped, was the chambers in Piccadilly which he had occupied in his earlier days. He said to himself “For a day or two it cannot matter where I live;” and, besides, the season was over and everything cheap, or so, at least, Edgar thought.
The first thing he had to do was to see that his lawyers had carried out his directions and paid his debts—the number of which appalled him—out of his capital. Decidedly it was time that he should do something, and should shake himself out of those habits of a rich man, which had, in these three years, though he had no idea of it, compromised him to the extent of half his little fortune. This debt he felt he could not trifle with. The more indifferent he was about money, and the better able he was to do without it, the more necessity was there for the clearing off to begin with, of everything in the shape of debt. After all was paid, and the residue settled on the old lady at Loch Arroch, there remained to him about a hundred pounds in the bank, besides the two ten-pound notes which he had in his pocket-book. “I must not touch the money in the bank,” he said to himself, with a prudence which contrasted beautifully with his other extravagances, “that must remain as something to fall back upon. Suppose, for instance, I should be ill,” Edgar reasoned with himself, always with a delicious suppressed consciousness of the joke involved under the utter gravity and extreme reasonableness of his own self-communings, “how necessary it would be to have something to fall back upon!” When he had made this little speech to himself, he subsided into silence, and it was not until half-an-hour later that he permitted himself to laugh.
Both of his own suggestions seemed so oddly impossible to him. To be ill—he, in whose veins the blood ran so lightly, so tunefully, his pulse beating with the calm and continued strength of perfect harmony; or to want a pound or two—he who had possessed unlimited credit and means which he had never exhausted all his life. The change was so great that it affected him almost childishly—as a poor man might be affected by coming into a sudden fortune, or as a very young wife is sometimes affected by the bewildering and laughable, yet certain fact, that she, the other day only a little girl in pinafores, is now at the head of a house, free to give as many orders as she pleases, and sure to be obeyed. The extreme humour of the situation is the first thing that strikes a lively girl, under these circumstances, and it was the humour of it which struck Edgar: a fact, perhaps, which may lower his character in the reader’s eyes. But that, alas, I cannot help, for such as he was, such I must show him, and his character had many defects. Often had he been upbraided that he did not feel vicissitudes which looked like ruin and destruction to minds differently constituted. He did not—he was the most insouciant, the most care-hating of men. Up to this period of his life he had found the means, somehow, of getting a smile, or some gleam of fun, out of everything that happened. When he could not manage this the circumstances were very strange indeed, and I suppose he felt it; but at all events, in such cases, he kept his failure to himself.
As soon as he had refreshed himself and breakfasted, he went out to see his lawyer, who received him with that air of melancholy disappointment which distinguishes all agents who are compelled to carry out what they think the foolish will of their principals: but who submitted the accounts to him, which showed that his directions had been obeyed, explaining everything in a depressed and despondent voice, full of the sense of injury.
“I am compelled to say, Mr. Earnshaw,” said this good man, “that, as you have paid so little attention to our wishes, I and my firm would hence-forward have declined to take charge of your business transactions, if it had been the least likely that you would have had any more business to do; but as this is not possible, or at least probable—”
“You will continue to do it,” said Edgar, laughing. “I hope so; it would be kind of you. No, I don’t suppose I shall have much more business to do.”