Mechanically he finished a sentence he had been writing, then letting the pen drop from his hand, sat where he was, numbed body and soul. Mrs Rimbolt’s words dinned in his ears, and with them came those old haunting sounds, the yells on the Bolsover meadows, the midnight shriek of the terrified boy, the cold sneer of his guardian, the brutal laugh of Jonah Trimble. All came back in one confused hideous chorus, yelling to him that his bad name was alive still, dogging him down, down, mocking his foolish dreams of deliverance and hope, hounding him out into the night to hide his head indeed, but never to hide himself from himself.
How long he sat there he knew not. When he rose he was at least calm and resolved.
He went up to his own room and looked through his little stock of possessions. The old suit in which he had come to Wildtree was there; and an impulse seized him to put it on in exchange for the trim garments he was wearing. Of his other goods and chattels he took a few special favourites. His Homer—Julius’s collar—a cricket cap—a pocket compass which Percy had given him, and an envelope which Raby had once directed to him for her uncle. His money—his last quarter’s salary—he took too, and his old stick which he had cut in the lanes near Ash Cottage. That was all. Then quietly descending the deserted stairs, and looking neither to the right hand nor the left, he crossed the hall and opened the front door.
A pang shot through him as he did so. Was he never to see Percy again, or her? What would they think of him?
The thought maddened him; and as he stood in the street he seemed to hear their voices, too, in the awful clamour, and rushed blindly forth, anywhere, to escape it.
Chapter Twenty Three.
A Plunge Downward.
A chill October squall was whistling through the trees—in Regent’s Park, stirring up the fallen leaves on the footpaths, and making the nursemaids, as they listlessly trundled their perambulators, shiver suddenly, and think of the nursery fire and the singing kettle on the hob. The gathering clouds above sent the park-keeper off to his shed for a waterproof, and emptied the carriage-drive of the vehicles in which a few semi-grand people were taking an afternoon airing at half a crown an hour. A little knot of small boys, intently playing football, with piled-up jackets for goals, and an old parti-coloured “bouncer” for a ball, were the last to take alarm at the lowering sky; nor was it till the big drops fell in their midst that they scattered right and left, and left the park empty.