"When an action speaks for itself, why use words? They will probably be the wrong words."
That was Uncle Bond!
He was going back to duty. That was quite enough at the moment. He did not want to talk about it—
The car rushed on up the broad, empty, sunlit road.
Although it was still so early in the day, the cattle were already lying under the green shade of the trees, in the fields. The hedges on either side of the road were white with the blossoms of the wild rose. Overhead the sky was a luminous blue, unflecked by cloud—
This was Paradise that he was rushing through. This was Paradise that he was leaving. Would he ever return? Perhaps he would. But never with his old recklessness, never with his old lightness of heart. So much had happened. He had been through so much. He had changed. There was a heaviness of thought, a deadness of feeling, within him, now, which he had never known before. It was as if he had lost something, lost some part of himself, which he would never be able to recover. Was it his youth?
The car swept on, smoothly, inexorably, without a check, at a high speed—
Was his real life beginning now? Uncle Bond again! Had he been living in a dream? Had he not often felt that he was living in a dream? a wild, grotesque, nightmare dream? But that had always been at the palace. Here, in Paradise, it had seemed to him that he was in touch with reality. And now, Paradise itself, and all that had happened there, seemed a dream. High time to awake out of sleep? He would be glad to awake. He would be glad to touch the real. But would he ever awake?
The rushing, throbbing car, the motionless figure of the Duke at his side, the broad, winding road, the sunlit, peaceful, countryside, his own thoughts—all these things were the very stuff of dreams, fantastic, unbelievable, unreal. His deadness of feeling, his heaviness of thought, were dream. His lost youth was dream. This silence? No one ever spoke in dreams—
At last the throbbing car slowed down suddenly; then stopped.