“What a blessed fool I am,” said the cabman below his breath, but lashing his horse explosively—”to throw away half a sovereign sooner than hold my tongue! He must be the devil himself to have heard me—and as for eyes—good Lord, I shouldnʼt like to drive him much.”
“You are wrong,” replied Mr. Garnet through the pigeon–hole, handing him twopence for the tollman; “I am not the devil, sir; as you may some day know. Have no fear of ever driving me again. You shall have your half–sovereign when I have got my ticket. Follow me in, and you shall know for what place I take it.”
The cabman was too dumb–foundered to do anything but resolve that he would go straight home when he got his money, and tell his old woman about it. Then he applied himself to the whip in earnest, for he could not too soon be rid of this job; and so Bull Garnet won his train, and gave the driver the other half–sovereign, with a peculiar nod, having noticed that he feared to approach while the ticket was applied for.
Bull Garnet took a second–class ticket. His extravagance towards the cabman was the last he would ever exhibit. He felt a call upon him now to save for his family every farthing. All was lost to them but money, and alas, too much of that. Now if he cut his throat in the train, could he be attainted of felony? And would God be any the harder on him? No, he did not think He would. It might be some sort of atonement even. But then the shock to Pearl and Bob, to see him brought home with his head hanging back, and hopeless red stitches under it. It would make the poor girl a maniac, after all the shocks and anguish he had benumbed her with already. What a fool he had been not to buy strychnine, prussic acid, or laudanum! And yet—and yet—and yet——He would like to see them just once more—blessed hearts—once more.
He sat in the last compartment of the last carriage in the train, which had been added, in a hurry, immediately behind the break van, and the swinging and the jerking very soon became tremendous. He knew not, neither cared to know, that Simon Chope and Bailey Kettledrum were in a first–class carriage near the centre of the train. Presently the violent motion began to tell upon him, and he felt a heavy dullness creeping over his excited mind; and all the senses, which had been during several hours of tension as prompt and acute as ever they were in his prime of power, began to flag, and daze, and wane, and he fell into a waking dream, a “second person” of sorrow. But first—whether for suicide, or for self–defence, he had tried both doors and found them locked; and he was far too large a man to force his way through the window.
He dreamed, with a loose sense of identity, about the innocent childhood, the boyhoodʼs aspiration, the young manʼs sense of ability endorsing the right to aspire. Even his bodily power and vigour revived in the dream before him, and he knitted his muscles, and clenched his fists, and was ready to fight fools and liars. Who had fought more hard and hotly against the hard cold ways of the age, the despite done to the poor and lowly, the sarcasm bred by self–conscious serfdom in clever men of the world, the preference of gold to love, and of position to happiness? All the weak gregarious tricks, shifts of coat, and pupa–ism, whereby we noble Christians reduce our social history to a passage in entomology, and quench the faith of thinking men in Him whose name we take in vain—the great Originator—all these feminine contradictions, and fond things foully invented, fables Atellan (if they be not actually Fescennine) had roused the combatism of young Bull, ere he learned his own disgrace.
And when he learned it, such as it was—a proof by its false incidence how infantile our civilization is—all his motherʼs bitter wrong, her lifelong sense of shame and crushing (because she had trusted a liar, and the hollow elder–stick “institution” was held up against her, and none would take her part without money, even if she had wished it), then he had chosen his motherʼs course, inheriting her strong nature, let the shame lie where it fell by right and not by rule, and carried all his energies into Neo–Christian largeness.
All that time of angry trial now had passed before him, and the five years of his married life (which had not been very happy, for his wife never understood him, but met his quick moodiness with soft sulks); and then in his dream–review he smiled, as his children began to toddle about, and sit on his knees, and look at him.
Once he awoke, and gazed about him. The train had stopped at Winchester. He was all alone in the carriage still, and all his cash was safe. He had stowed it away very carefully in a hidden pocket. To his languid surprise, he fell back on the seat. How unlike himself, to be sure; and with so much yet to do! He strove to arise and rouse himself. He felt for the little flask of wine, which Pearl had thrust into his pocket, but he could not pull it out and drink; such a languor lay upon him. He had felt it before, but never before been so overcome by it. Once or twice, an hour or so before the sun came back again, this strange cold deadness (like a mammoth nightmare frozen) had lain on him, in his lonely bed, and then he knew what death was, and only came back to life again through cold sweat and long fainting.
He had never consulted any doctor about the meaning of this. With his bold way of thinking, and judging only by his own experience and feeling, he had long ago decided that all medical men were quacks. What one disorder could they cure? All they had learned, and that by a fluke, was a way to anticipate one: and even that way seemed worn out now.