“La nuit porte conseil. You will think differently in the morning. I am dining at Richmond. I can’t stay another moment, but for Heaven’s sake take till to-morrow to think it over Ta-ta!”
“Good-day.”
Bertram looks out of the window and watches Fanshawe’s private hansom flash down Piccadilly; he vaguely wishes that he too were going to dine at Richmond, and were not fettered by principle to a cheese omelette and a vol au vent of mushrooms.
It is a fine, breezy sunshiny morning on the morrow, good yachting weather, as some one says who is going down to Gravesend for the first cutter race of the season.
Bertram walks along Rotten Row under the trees with a mind so preoccupied that he narrowly escapes being knocked down by an ambassadress on a bicycle. He is repeating to himself what he said to the old duke, “fais ce que dois advienne que pourra,” and he is conscious that the injunction has its thorny side like most other virtuous things.
He has been unable to sleep all night for the tormenting visions evoked by Folliott’s visit and his dead cousin’s bequest.
Because you valorously resist a temptation it does not any the less sharply assail you. Because you limit yourself strictly to rice croquettes you do not the less painfully recall the forbidden flavour of a salmi of game. He considers it no more possible for him in common decency to accept this property than to embrace Mahomedanism or renounce clothing; but none the less is he haunted by the possibilities that its possession would bring with it.
He is human, and his heart is heavy as he walks along in the pleasant April wind. He realises that there are many charming things which he has renounced—voluntarily renounced, indeed; but, then, is it really more agreeable to kill oneself than to be killed? Anyhow, the result is the same; the grave is as deep and the sleep as eternal.
When he has arrived opposite the residential hotel which raises the colossal offence of its eleven stories between the elm-trees and their right to air and light he sits down, feeling rather limp and aimless; and lighting a cigarette, he awaits the coming of Fanshawe. There is a policeman close at hand; some children are near, with their nurses; and a respectable-looking, middle-aged, brisk woman, with some fine linen in a flat basket, is approaching. He raises his hat to her.
“Is that you, Mrs. Brown? I never saw you in the Park before.”