June gave way to July, July to August, August to September. Lottie reigned at Brackenhill, and Mrs. Middleton, whose heart clung to the neighborhood where she had lived so long, had taken a house on the other side of Fordborough. Between it and her old home lay an impassable gulf—none the less real that it was not marked on the county map. It appeared there as a distance of five miles and a quarter, with a good road, but Mrs. Horace Thorne, as well as Mrs. Middleton, knew better. Lottie laughed, and Horace's resentment was so keen that he was almost unconscious of his pain.
Percival's utter disappearance was a nine days' wonder in Fordborough, and when curiosity was dying out it flamed up again on the discovery that the marriage was not only put off, but was off altogether. This fact, considered in connection with the old squire's will, gave rise to the idea that there was something queer about Mr. Percival Thorne—that he had been found out at the last moment, and had lost both wife and legacy in consequence. "No doubt it was hushed up on condition he should take himself off. The best thing they could do, but how sad for an old county family! Still, there will be black sheep, and what a mercy it was that Miss Langton was saved from him!" So people talked, and generally added that they could not tell why—just a feeling, you know—but they never had liked that Percival Thorne.
In September, Godfrey Hammond cut a tiny slip out of the Times and sent it to the banished man: "On the 15th, the wife of Horace Thorne, Esq., Brackenhill, Fordborough, of a son."
Percival ate his breakfast that morning with the scrap of paper by his plate, and looked at it with fierce, defiant eyes. Lottie was avenged indeed—she would never know how bitterly. He had sworn that he would never think of Brackenhill, yet without his knowledge it had been the background to his thoughts of everything. And now the cruel injustice of his fate had taken a new lease of life in this baby boy: it would outlive him, it would become eternal. Percival leapt to his feet with a short laugh: "Well, that's over and done with! Good luck to the poor little fellow! he's innocent enough. And I don't suppose he'll ever know what a scoundrel his father was." So saying, he glanced at his watch and marched off to his work.
Those three months had left their trace on him. He loathed his life; he had no companions, no hope; he was absorbed in the effort to endure his suffering. His indolence made his daily labor hateful as the treadmill. He was fastidious, and his surroundings sickened him. His food disgusted him, and so did the close atmosphere of the office. But he had chosen his fate, and he had no heart to try to escape from it, since it gave him the means of keeping body and soul together. Day after day, as that hot September wore away, he looked out on a dreary range of roofs and chimney-pots. He learned to know and hate every broken tile. From his bedroom he looked into a narrow back yard, deep like a well, at the bottom of which children swarmed, uncleanly and unwholesome, and women gossiped and wrangled as they hung out dingy rags to dry. The fierce sun shone on it all, and on Percival as he leant at his window surveying it with disgust, yet something of fascination too. "I fancied the sun wouldn't seem so bright in holes like this," he mused. "I thought everything would be dull and dim. Instead of which, he glares into every cranny and corner, as if he were pointing at all the filth and squalid misery, and makes it ten times more abominable." Nor did the slanting rays light up anything pleasant and fresh in the bedroom itself. It was shabby and small, with coarsely-papered walls and a discolored ceiling. Percival remarked that his window had a very wide sill. He never found out the reason, unless it were intended that he should take the air by sitting on it and dangling his legs over the foulest of water-butts. But when night came the broad sill was the favorite battlefield for all the cats in the neighborhood. It might have been pointed out as readily as they point you out the place where the students fight at Heidelberg.
From his sitting-room he looked on a melancholy street. The unsubstantial houses tried to seem—not respectable, no word so honest could be applied to them, but—genteel, and failed even in that miserable ambition. Percival used to watch the plastered fronts, flaking in the sun and rain, old while yet new, with no grace of bygone memory or present strength, till he fancied that they might be perishing of some foul leprosy like that described in Leviticus. And the wearisome monotony! They were all just alike, except that here and there one was a little dingier than its neighbors, with the railings more broken and the windows dirtier. One day, when his landlady insisted on talking to him and Percival was too courteous to be absolutely silent, he asked where the prospect was from which the street took its name. She said they used to be able to see Three-Corner Green from their attic-windows. In her mother's time there was a tree and a pond there, she believed, and she herself could remember it quite green, a great place for Cheap Jacks and people who preached and sold pills. But now it was all done away with and built over. It was Paradise Place, and Paradise Place wasn't much of a prospect, though there might be worse. But it was no detriment to Mr. Thorne's rooms, for it was only the attic that ever had the view. However, folks must call the place something, if only for the letters; and Bellevue looked well on them and sounded airy, and she was never the one for change. This sounded so like the beginning of a discourse on things in general that Percival thanked her and fled.
It was about ten minutes' walk to Mr. Ferguson's office. There, week after week, he toiled with dull industry. He could not believe that his drudgery would last: something—death perhaps—must come to break the monotony of that slowly unwinding chain of days, which was like a grotesquely dreary dream. To have flung himself heart and soul into his work not only demanded an effort of which he felt himself incapable, but it seemed to him that such an effort could only serve to identify him with this hideous life. So, with head bowed over interminable pages, he labored with patient indifference. On his left sat a clerk ten or fifteen years older than himself, a white-faced man, who blinked like an owl in sunlight and had a wearisome cough. There was always a sickly smell of lozenges about him, and he was fretful if every window was not tightly closed. On Percival's right was a sallow youth of nineteen. He worked by fits and starts, sometimes driving his pen along as if the well-being of the universe depended on the swift completion of his task and the planets might cease to revolve if he were idle, while a few minutes later he would be drawing absently on his blotting-paper or feeling for his whiskers, as if they might have arrived suddenly without his being aware of it. Probably he was thinking over his next speech at the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society. They debated high and important matters at their weekly meetings. They inquired, "Was Oliver Cromwell justified in putting King Charles to death?" they read interesting papers about it, and voted the unlucky monarch into or out of his grave with an energy which would have allowed him little rest if it could have taken effect. They marshalled many arguments to decide the knotty and important question, "Does our Country owe most to the Warrior or the Statesman?" and they made up their minds and voted about that too. The sallow young man was rather a distinguished member of the society, and had much to say on such problems as these.
The clerks did not like Thorne. They felt that he was not one of themselves, and said that he was stuck up and sulky. They resented his silence. If you do not like a man you always understand his silence as the speech you would most dislike—veiled. Above all, they resented his grave politeness. They left him alone, with an angry suspicion that it was exactly what he wanted them to do; as indeed it was, though he was painfully conscious of the atmosphere of distrust and ill-will in which he lived. But he could have found no pleasure in their companionship, and in fact was only interested in their coats. He was anxious to learn how shabby a man might become and pass unnoticed in the office; so he would glance, without turning his head, at the white-faced man's sleeve, and rejoice to see the same threadbare cuff travelling slowly across a wide expanse of parchment.
When he wrote to Hammond he said that he was getting on very well. He could not say that his work was very amusing, but very likely he should get more used to it in time. He wished to be left alone and to give it a fair trial. How was Sissy?
Hammond replied that Mrs. Middleton had aged a good deal, but that she and Sissy were both pretty well, and had got an idea—he could not think from whom—that Percival had gone in for the law and was going to do something very amazing indeed. "They are waiting to be surprised," Godfrey wrote, "like children on their birthdays. St. Cecilia especially wouldn't for worlds open her eyes till the right moment comes and you appear in your glory as lord chancellor or attorney-general, or something of the kind. I'm afraid she's a little hazy about it all, though of course she knows that you will be a very great man and that you will wear a wig. Mrs. Middleton is perhaps a trifle more moderate in her expectations. I left them to build their castles in the air, since you had bound me to secrecy, but I wish you would tell them the truth. Or I would help you, as you know, if I knew how."