"Yes; I loved—loved Barbara," I whispered brokenly.
"You shall see her again; talk with her again; come into her life again." There was a fierce eagerness about him that held me and frightened me. "That's what I'm going to do for you; that's what I meant when I said that I would bring you back to love and life and laughter. Look round this room—and then see it all swept away," he went on with growing excitement. "I've found one friend who will help us both; it may happen that we are not poor and forlorn any more. We have both suffered; it is right that we should have some little joy in our lives."
"What are you going to do with me?" I asked him, as I had asked before; but he laughed, and would not answer me.
I spent the rest of the day in that place, cowering over the fire, and striving hard to look back into the past. I found it difficult at first; it was like a closed book to me, in which only here and there, when I was able at last to open it, could I decipher a few words—a few broken sentences that came like the sigh of a dead wind blowing over the dead years back to me. I got up mechanically when I was called to eat what simple food he put before me, going back afterwards to crouch over the fire, and to start that burrowing process again into the lost years.
It was late in the evening when I saw him reading again that letter he had taken from his pocket, and muttering to himself over it. At last he seemed suddenly to make up his mind about it; he crammed it back into his pocket, and put on his hat, and announced that he was going out. "You can stay here," he told me curtly; "no one will interfere with you."
I sat still for a little time after he had gone; and then an intolerable restlessness seized upon me. I was like a lost spirit; I did not know what to do with myself. I found myself pacing out again on the floor the steps that for twenty years I had paced out in my cell; and finding the room too large, so that the steps would not fit in. And at last got my hat, and went out into the streets; and looked about me, with a new and definite idea for the first time growing in my mind.
Hammerstone Market! At Hammerstone Market I had been happy once; and there, waiting for me, and preserved in some strange fashion through all the years, was the life I had laid down and left behind me. Why had I not thought of this before? It was the simplest thing in the world; I had but to go to that place where I had been happy to pick up again the thread of my life, and to put together successfully the puzzle I did not now understand. So I set out for the place, with a new and happy confidence growing in my mind.
I was but groping yet, and I did not understand fully what I meant to do. I was but a poor thing, striving hard to get back to some life I had lost; and so it happened that I set about it as a child might have done, and in what seemed to my childish mind the simplest and most direct way.
I have wondered since what I must have looked like to any one who saw me then, wandering about in search of Hammerstone Market. I have a vision of myself as being tall and thin, and gaunt and old-looking; with deep eyes that must have been pathetic in the hopeless weariness that was in their depths. My years counted as nothing; I was a shabby tired old man, going back, pathetically enough, to pick up here and there a thread of the life that had been snatched so suddenly from me. I knew of no way to reach the place of my dreams, except to walk; and I only knew dimly that it lay in a county not very far to the north of London.