“Yes, I, too, am driven, but it is to follow you. What does it mean? Is it imagination of a morbid kind?” She paused. Leonard made no reply. “After all,” she continued, “there is nothing to do but to accept the situation, and to go on and see what happens.”
Leonard groaned. “Suppose,” he said, with a wintry smile, “that we are doomed to go on day after day till the end of things, just as that old man has walked up and down his terrace day after day for seventy years. What a fearful tramp! What a monotony! What a life!”
“A dreary prospect. Yet, to go over the same story day after day, every day, seems little better than that walk up and down the terrace, does it?”
“Leave it, Constance. Give it up and go back to your own work.”
He took up the fatal book and threw it to the other end of the room.
“Frankly, I would leave it if I could. The thing weighs upon me. I understand what possession means. I am possessed. I must follow you.”
“Constance, we are growing ridiculous. We are two persons of culture, and we talk of possession and of an unseen force that drags us.”
“But since we are dragged——”
“Yes, since we are dragged”—he crossed over the room, picked up the book, and brought it back—“and we are dragged—let us obey.”
It was then three weeks since this inquiry had begun. It was now the sole object of their lives. They hunted in the British Museum among old papers, they went to the Hall and turned out desks and drawers and cupboards of letters, documents, papers, and accounts. They found enough to reconstruct the daily life of the old man before the tragedy, and the history of his predecessors. They were the simple annals of peaceful country life, with no events but those that one expects—births of children, buying of lands, festivities.