Holles kept to his quarters below-stairs, smoking continuously and drinking deeply, too, until he had consumed the little store of wine the house contained. Then not even the nepenthe of the cup remained to assuage his grim despondency, his repeated assertions to himself that his life was lived, that he was a dead man without further business above-ground.
Thus August found them, and from the watchman he heard incredible stories of London’s deepening plight, whilst from the window he nightly beheld the comet in the heavens, that latest portent of menace, the flaming sword of wrath—as the watchman termed it—that was hung above the accursed city, stretching, as it seemed, from Whitehall to the Tower.
They were within three days of the reopening of the house when at last one evening Mrs. Dallows came to him trembling with excitement, and a little out of breath.
“Miss Sylvester, sir, bids me say that she will be obliged if you will step upstairs to see her.”
The message startled him.
“No, no!” he cried out like a man in panic. Then, controlling himself, he took refuge in postponement that would give him time to think: “Say ... say that if Miss Sylvester will excuse me ... not this evening. I am tired ... the heat....” he vaguely explained.
The nurse cocked her head on one side and her bright little birdlike eyes considered him wistfully. “If not this evening, when? To-morrow morning?”
“Yes, yes,” he answered eagerly, thinking only of averting the immediate menace. “In the morning. Tell her that I ... I shall wait upon her then.”
Mrs. Dallows withdrew, leaving him oddly shaken and afraid. It was himself he feared, himself he mistrusted. Where once the boy had worshipped, the man now loved with a love that heaped up and fed the fires of shame in his soul until they threatened to consume him. At his single interview with Nancy he had exposed his mind. He had been strong; but he might not be strong again. The gentleness of purpose of which she had allowed him a glimpse, a gentleness born of her cursed gratitude, might lead him yet to play the coward, to give her the full confidence that she invited, and so move her pity and through pity her full forgiveness. And then if—as might well betide—he should prove so weak as to fling himself at her feet, and pour out the tale of his longings and his love, out of her sense of debt, out of her pity and her gratitude she might take him, this broken derelict of humanity, and so doom herself to be dragged down with him into the kennels where his future lay.
There stood a peril of a wrong far worse than that which already he had done her, and for which in some measure he had perhaps atoned. And because he could not trust himself to come again into her presence preserving the silence that his honour demanded, he suffered tortures now at the thought that to-morrow, willy-nilly, he must see her, since it was her wish, and she was strong enough herself to seek him should he still refuse to go.