And then, suddenly, a Family History of the darkest and most gloomy kind—murder, sudden death, suicide, early death, the shattering of a strong mind, bankruptcy, poverty, cousins whom no kindliness could call presentable—all this fell upon him at one blow. Can one be surprised that he touched the lamp-posts as he went along?
Is it wonderful that he could not get rid of the dreadful story? It occupied his whole brain; it turned everything else out—the great economical article for the Nineteenth Century, all his books, all his occupations. If he read in the printed page, his eyes ran across the lines and up and down the lines, but nothing reached his brain. The Family History was a wall which excluded everything else; or it was a jealous tenant who drove every intruder out as with a broom. If he tried to write, his pen presently dropped from his fingers, for the things that lay on his brain were not allowed by that new tenant to escape. And all night long, and all day long, pictures rose up and floated before his eyes; terrible pictures—pictures of things that belonged to the History; pictures that followed each other like animated photographs, irrepressible, not to be concealed, or denied, or refused admission.
This obsession was only just beginning: it intended to become deeper and stronger: it was going to hold him with grip and claw, never to let him go by night or day until—— But the end he could not understand.
You know how, at the first symptoms of a long illness, there falls upon the soul a premonitory sadness: the nurses and the doctors utter words of cheerfulness and hope: there is a loophole, there always is a loophole, until the climax and the turning-point. The patient hears, and tries to receive solace. But he knows better. He knows without being told that he stands on the threshold of the torture chamber: the door opens, he steps in, because he must: he will lie there and suffer—O Lord! how long?
With such boding and gloom of soul—boding without words, gloom inarticulate—Leonard walked slowly homewards.
It was about three in the afternoon that he mounted his stairs. In his mood, brooding over the new-found tragedies, it seemed quite natural, and a thing to be expected, that his cousin Mary Anne should be sitting on the stairs opposite his closed door. She rose timidly.
“The man said he could not tell when you would come home, so I waited,” she explained.
“He ought to have asked you to wait inside. Did you tell him who you were?”
“No. It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to disturb your Sabbath calm.”
“My—— Oh yes! Pray come in.”