“I want help from no one,” she replied. “I only want to go away and hide myself.”
“As you will,” he replied, and shrugged his shoulders and left her. He reflected, as he went to his own room, on the ingratitude of all created beings, and of women in particular, and decided after much thought that his best plan for his own future self-preservation would be to follow Brian and endeavour to get again into his good graces. He saw with some penetration that Brian was the only man now left who had any money at his command.
She sat for a long time after he had left her, trying to get the whole terrible business into an ordinary compass in order that she might understand it. It was a thing so gigantic and so terrible and so unexpected that it was difficult for her to realize it completely. All that she had ever hoped and prayed for—all her world, in fact—had been swept away in an instant; she wanted, as she had said, to go and hide herself and strive to forget it. Left alone with all her dreams shattered, with the man in whom her faith had been centred standing before her in a mental picture, debased and fallen and degraded, she dared not look upon the world—scarcely dared to think about the matter.
It was quite late in the evening when, taking nothing with her, and glancing to right and left like a guilty thing that fears to be seen, she crept out of the house and away into the streets. In the hours that had passed since she had heard the story she had prayed once or twice for death; had hoped that some sudden madness might come upon her which should cut off the years as by a magician’s knife, and leave her, a little lonely child again, in the garden of her father’s house. And with that prayer came a new thought—a sudden wish to see the place again.
It was impossible that her mind could be left entirely blank or her heart quite vacant; with everything that she had believed in and trusted stripped away from her, her thoughts went back to Comethup, and raised him a silent, splendid figure blessing and helping her through all these years during which she had flouted him and set him aside. Beside that splendid figure the man she had dreamed she loved faded into nothingness; she felt that, if only for an hour, she must get back to the old place, where she had broken his heart and left him; must get back, if only to cry her own heart out.
She had a little money with her, and was fortunate in catching the last train, which would take her to within a few miles of the old town. Fatigue meant nothing to her; she alighted at Deal and set out to walk, hurrying along the road and whispering his name as she ran, and crying incoherently to him to forgive her.
The town was dark and silent when she reached it. She was in a mood to sit down and cry—half from weariness, half from delight at being in the old familiar streets again. She hastened on toward the garden and went in, swaying a little from weakness as she passed over the fallen gate and up the dreary avenue. There, under the balcony where she had parted from him, she stood still, looking up at the deserted house and weeping bitterly. And suddenly from among the shadows of the trees there stole out the figure of a man.
He came forward slowly with his arm stretched out; as the moonlight fell upon his face she saw that it was the old shoemaker, Medmer Theed, and that he was smiling upon her. The sight of one friendly face in that dark and desolate garden struck a chord in her that had not been wakened before; she caught his hands and burst into a sudden passion of tears.
The old man drew her gently to his breast, and laid her head there and whispered soothingly to her. “My child, my baby!” he said. “They shall not harm you. I knew you would come back; I have waited here so long—so long! Yet the nights have been full of dreams of you; the wind has whispered your name among the trees; the birds seeking their nests have cried to me, ’She will come back; when all else desert her, she will come back to you.’ And see, they were right, and all the waiting is ended. Just as I dreamed that she came back to me—she who died—so the child I loved has returned, and all my watching is over.”
“Take me away! Take me away, and hide me,” she cried, clinging to him.