Percival answered that Godfrey must not betray him: "I couldn't endure that Horace and his wife should know of my difficulties; and as to living on Aunt Harriet—never! And how could I go back to Fordborough, now that Sissy and I have parted? She would sacrifice herself for me—poor child!—out of sheer pity. No: here I can live, after a fashion, and defy the world. And here I will live, and hope to know some day that Sissy has found her happiness. Till then let her think that I am prospering."
Godfrey shrugged his shoulders over Percival's note. It was irrational, no doubt, but Thorne had a right to please himself, and might as well take care of his pride, since he had not much else to take care of. So he attempted no persuasion, but simply sent any Fordborough news and forwarded occasional letters from Mrs. Middleton and Sissy. As the autumn wore on, Percival began to feel strange as he opened the envelopes and saw the handwriting which belonged to his old life. He had an absurd idea that the letters should not have come to him—that his former self, the self Sissy had known, was gone. He read her letters by the light of what Hammond had told him, and saw the delicate wording by which she tried to show her sympathy, yet almost repelled his confidence. She was so anxious not to thrust herself into his secrets—it was so evident that she would not be troublesome, but would wait with shut eyes, as Hammond had said, for a birthday surprise and triumph! O poor little Sissy! O faith which he felt within himself no strength to vindicate! He answered her in carefully weighed sentences, and smiled as he wrote them down because they amused him—a smile sadder than tears. Percival Thorne was dead, and he was some one else, trying to think what Percival would have said, and to hide his death from Sissy, lest her heart should break for pity.
It was very foolish? Yes. But if you had parted yourself from every one you knew; if for five months you had never heard a friendly word; if you had a secret to hide and a part to play; if you lived alone, surrounded by faces of people with whom you had no faintest touch of sympathy—faces which were to you like those of swarming Chinese or men and women in a nightmare,—perhaps you might have some thoughts and fancies less calm and less rational than of old. And the more changed Percival felt himself, the more he shrank from the friends he had left.
November came. One day he looked at the date on the office almanac and remembered that it was exactly a year since he went down to Brackenhill and heard of old Bridgman's death. He could not repress a short sudden laugh. It was half under his breath, but his neighbor, who was at that moment gazing fiercely into space and turning a sentence, heard it, and felt that it was in mockery of him. Percival was thinking how seriously he had considered that important question, "Would he stand as the Liberal candidate for Fordborough?" Percival Thorne, Esq., M.P.! He might well laugh as he sat at his desk filling in a bundle of notices. But from that moment the sallow youth on his right hated him with a deadly hatred.
December came—a dull, gray, bitter December—not clear and sparkling, as December sometimes is, nor yet misty and warm, as if it would have you take it for a lingering autumn, but bitter without beauty, harsh and pitiless. Keen gusts of wind whirled dust and straws and rubbish in dreary little dances along Bellevue street, the faces of the passers-by were nipped and miserable with the cold, and the sullen sky hung low above the pallid row of houses opposite. Percival looked out on this and thought of Brackenhill, which he left in leafy June. He was very miserable: he had always been quickly sensitive to the beauty or dreariness around him, and the gray dulness of the scene entered into his very soul. Warmth, leisure, sunlight and blue sky! There was plenty of sunlight somewhere in the world. O God! what had he done that it should be denied him?
There was a weary craving upon him that might have led to terrible results, but his pride and fastidiousness saved him. His delicately cultivated palate loathed the coarse fire of spirits, and he had a healthy horror of drugs. Once or twice he had thought of opium when he could not escape, even in dreams, from the grayness of his life. "This is unendurable," he would say; and he played in fancy with the key which unlocks the gates of that strange region lying on the borders of paradise and hell. But his better sense questioned, "Will it be any more endurable when I have ruined my nerves and the coats of my stomach?" It did not seem probable that it would be. If death had been the risk he might have faced it, but he recoiled from the thought of a premature and degraded old age, still chained to the hateful desk.
There are times when a man may be cheaply made into a hero. What would not Percival have given for the chance of doing some deed of reckless bravery?
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
A LEVANTINE PICNIC.
We had been a long time in Suda Bay—one of the numerous indentations on the north coast of Crete—in company with Turkish, Egyptian, Russian and Austrian men of war. Fighting was going on at intervals on the mountains—of which Mount Ida and some of the other peaks were covered with snow—and we could sometimes see from our anchorage the spirts of white smoke where the Cretans (not "slow-bellies" now) were ambushing the Turkish columns as they struggled up the mountain-defiles. Egyptian transports came in and landed their long-legged, white-uniformed troops, who perhaps bivouacked that night on the shores of the bay, and the next day were absorbed in the great reticulations of the mountain-island, which must have seemed a strange country indeed to the Fellah recruits, to whom the Mokattam Hills were mountains.