The hot, blank days of August drifted by, and as I saw the boulevards empty themselves day by day, and Paris grow hotter and duller each afternoon, I felt the solitary existence weigh heavier and heavier upon me. The loss of the dog seemed to have made a larger gap in my existence than I should have believed; his unused collars still lay upon my mantelpiece, his plate and saucer still stood in the corner by the hearth, and sometimes when I was climbing the dark stairs at night to my empty room I felt as if I would have given years of my life to have had the dog leap up into my arms in welcome.
One of these nights, when I came into the unlighted room, I saw a letter lying, a white square, in the dusk, upon the table. I supposed it was from my father, as Lucia never wrote, and I was too occupied, or indifferent, or rather both, to keep up other correspondents.
In answer to the first long desperate letter that I had written to my father after Lucia's visit, in which I told him, without explaining farther, that an accident had happened to the MS., and begging him to release me from the arrangement made before I left England, I had received a derisive note from him, full of ironical sympathy with my misfortunes, and advising me to settle down to another year's work, with a good grace and a contented spirit.
My appeals on behalf of Lucia and myself he simply ignored.
I tore the letter into atoms and flung them over the balcony, and since then my letters to him had been short notes, out of which I studiously kept my own feelings. There was no one now to whom I could either speak or write a word of personal matters.
An anchorite in a cave of the desert could not have been more shut off from that dear communication with his fellows that a man hardly values till he loses it.
When I had lighted the lamp I sat staring at the loose sheets of the manuscript lying on the side table, noting painfully how far it was from completion, and it was only when I lifted it to the middle table for work that I glanced at the letter again.
As my eyes fell on the superscription the blood leapt into my face—it was Howard's. There was a strong disinclination in me to take up the letter, to read it, to let my thoughts flow in his direction at all. Resolutely I had tried to banish the memory of him from my mind, to utterly throw out his image from my recollection. The thought of him was disagreeable, and therefore never welcomed.
The idea of one person cherishing, as the phrase is, hatred, envy, or anger against another, always seems to me incomprehensible. All these are unpleasant sensations, and I sweep them out of my mind as quickly as I possibly can, not from any exalted motives, but simply as useless, cumbering lumber, for which I decline to use my brain at a storehouse. Howard had injured me enough.
Was I to waste my time and my energies in hating him? And yet the time had not come when I could think of him with calm indifference. Therefore, to scout the idea of him whenever it presented itself, to refuse to dwell upon him and what he had inflicted on me, was the only way to escape additional pain and discomfort for myself. And now, at sight of his handwriting, the beast, the monster of declining hate rose in me again, and I remembered him.