Touched by the solemn passion of his sorrow, they did not speak, but went on in brooding silence, regardless of the passing crowds around them. In a few minutes they reached the head of State street, where the Captain silently nodded and left them, and turning in the opposite direction, they went on to Temple street.
CHAPTER XXXII.
HERALD SHADOWS.
It was about one o’clock when they arrived. After a hasty dinner, Muriel withdrew to argue matters with her mother, while Harrington went into the library, and Wentworth, who was suffering from the heat, started for home to change his clothes, promising to meet his friend soon at the house in Chambers street.
The conference with Mrs. Eastman lasted nearly an hour, failed of result of course, and without telling her mother of her purpose, Muriel went into the library, and gave her decision in favor of instant action.
Harrington immediately put his revolver in his pocket, and took, in case of need, a hundred dollars in bills, which Muriel, with her usual foresight, had drawn from the bank that morning. Then receiving her fervent hopes for his success, he folded her in his arms and kissed her, and sallied forth upon his mission.
He was resolute and calm, yet nervously alive with incertitudes and apprehensions, which fled like strange shadows across his burning brain. The day was still brilliant and sultry, but in the stainless blue of the morning masses of bright wild clouds had gathered, and lay fantastically changing from shape to shape in densely huddled concourse. He watched them as he strode along, finding in their tottering transformations and flaring brightness, as in the mutable shapes they assumed, some weird expression of his own mood. Here they were unclimbable alps of cloudy snow, upreared in a glittering mass of mountainous giddiness, and toppling from their bases. There they stretched in a carded drift of fierce white fire, smouldering in the resplendent blue, and consumed by its own intensity. In one place they had heaped into the form of a defying giant, impotently melting away in fantastic dissolution. In another they were a long cohort of crouching lions looking out of their manes. Below the zenith, before him, a solitary cloud shaped itself into a vapory hydra; beyond, another wore the semblance of some mongrel dragon of the air; and all were sphinxine, monstrous, dazzling, wonderful—a phantasmagoric rack of intervolved chimeras.
With such a pageant bright and wild above his head, and with a feeling corresponsive to it all within his mind, he strode on through the quiet streets of the neighborhood, and arrived at his house in Chambers street. For some reason or other, the Captain had not yet arrived, and, expecting him presently, after a minute’s kindly chat with Hannah and Sophy, he went into his own apartment.
The afternoon sun lay bright and cheerful within the room where he had spent so many sweet and studious hours, but the first thing he saw on entering, brought night and winter on his heart. Below the empty pedestal, the bust of the beloved Verulam lay shattered to fragments on the floor. His head sunk upon his breast, and he stood sadly gazing upon the ruin. He did not grieve for the loss of the treasured statue; he did not even remember to think how the accident could have occurred; all considerations were lost in the feeling of mournful significance which swept over his burning brain, as he brooded on the broken image of the majestic Lord of Civilization.
A few moments he gazed upon the wreck with a face of marble; then, suddenly, his features became convulsed, and his eyes filled with tears.