"Too late!" she says, with a heavy, tearless sob—"five minutes too late! Oh God, it is hard!"
"Any luggage, Miss?" asks the porter, in his civil, matter-of-fact voice.
The common-place question brings her back to life. "No, none," she answers, collecting herself; and so saying walks into the station, and, taking refuge in the waiting-room, sinks down upon a green Utrecht velvet chair.
Owing to the earliness of the hour, other occupant of the room is there none; neither is there any fire (a fire always looks in good spirits; it never has the blues). Alongside of the empty fire-place stands a stiff, green Utrecht velvet sofa, and round the bare table more green Utrecht velvet chairs. Opposite to Esther, against the wall, hangs a roll of texts. Involuntarily her haggard eyes lift themselves to them, and light upon this one—which, under the slightly inappropriate title of "Encouragements to Repentance," heads the list: "Woe to me, for I am undone!" She shudders, "Is it an omen?" turns away her head quickly, and tries to look out of window, but the wire-blind hinders her gaze. Once again, "Woe is me, for I am undone!" standing out clear and black in large type from the white paper, greets her eyes. She can bear it no longer, but rising hastily, runs out, and begins to walk swiftly up and down the platform.
Brainton is a large station—a junction of many lines. Engines are snorting and puffing about; boilers letting off steam, with a noise calculated to break the drum of any ear; tarpaulin-covered waggons standing shunted on side lines. A train has just come in, and is disgorging its human load; a man with a hammer is walking along by the side of it, stooping and tapping the wheels; porters are driving luggage-piled trucks before them, and shouting out, "By your leave!" to any unwary traveller who may cross the relentless path of their Juggernaut: other parties are enduring and answering, with angelic patience and bonhomie, the agitated and incoherent questions of unprotected females in waterproof cloaks and turn-down hats. Everybody and everything is rampantly alive; even to his handiwork, man seems to have imparted some of his own intense vitality; to the engines he has given motion and voice—motion and voice ten thousandfold stronger than his own.
In her hurried walks, Esther suddenly comes face to face with a fair-haired youth, who, followed by a porter carrying a gun-case, is walking lightly along with his hands in his pockets, whistling for very lightheartedness,
"I paddle my own canoe."
Jack's tune! What business has he to whistle it? All fair-haired youths, with nothing very prominent in any of their features, are more or less alike; and this amount of resemblance the unknown bears to her boy. Long after he has passed her, amid the shrieking of the engines, the shouts of the porters—"Take your seats for Wolverhampton, Birmingham!" "All here for Chester, Warrington, and Manchester?"—the well-known tune echos faintly back to her ears. An overpowering, blinding, deafening rush of feeling comes over her; she sits down hastily on a bench that is near at hand, in close proximity to an Irish labourer, with a blue-spotted bundle, and, careless of the contaminating contact, buries her head in her hands, and rocks to and fro in a paroxysm of despair.
It is one of those incontrovertible facts that we all know to be true, and that we all feel to be false, that every hour is of the same length; that in an hour of Elysium there are sixty whole minutes, and that in an hour of Hades there are only sixty. In Esther's hour of waiting there are, however, seventy-five minutes, as the train is a quarter of an hour late.
"Is it a fast train?" she asks eagerly of the bearded guard, who, with the politeness inborn in guards, opens the carriage-door for her.