“I’ve something to tell you,” said the assailer, taking hold of his arm. “I’m in a tremendous state of mind, and want someone to share my delight.... You know Dora Milvain; I have asked her to marry me, and, by the Powers! she has given me an encouraging answer! Not an actual yes, but encouraging! She’s away in the Channel Islands, and I wrote——”
He talked on for a quarter of an hour. Then, with a sudden movement, the listener freed himself.
“I can’t go any farther,” he said hoarsely. “Goodbye!”
Whelpdale was disconcerted.
“I have been boring you. That’s a confounded fault of mine; I know it.”
Biffen had waved his hand, and was gone.
A week or two would see him at the end of his money. He had no lessons now, and could not write; from his novel nothing was to be expected. He might apply again to his brother, but such dependence was unjust and unworthy. And why should he struggle to preserve a life which had no prospect but of misery?...
It was in the hours following his encounter with Whelpdale that he first knew the actual desire of death, the simple longing for extinction. One must go far in suffering before the innate will-to-live is thus truly overcome; weariness of bodily anguish may induce this perversion of the instincts; less often, that despair of suppressed emotion which had fallen upon Harold. Through the night he kept his thoughts fixed on death in its aspect of repose, of eternal oblivion. And herein he found solace.
The next night it was the same. Moving among many common needs and occupations, he knew not a moment’s cessation of heartache, but when he lay down in the darkness a hopeful summons whispered to him. Night, which had been the worst season of his pain, had now grown friendly; it came as an anticipation of the sleep that is everlasting.