“My own daughter—Sara’s child—married, to a Christian.”
Long he sat in an awful loneliness, his eyes dull and weary, looking at the spectres of the past. At length he took from a drawer at his side a double sheet of blue foolscap, and dipped a pen very slowly in the ink.
“I, Israel Hart, will and bequeath——”
“No,” he said. “Not now—I must think it out again. Ask God for guidance.”
He rose, put the paper in the fire, and sank into the great armchair close by. And there he sat, thinking, thinking. At last his eyelids closed and he slept.
Hugh went out into a night of utter blackness and icy sleet. Great splashes of half-melted snow fell against his face and oozed down in liquid. He made his way along the drive and out of the front gate. Dimly through the darkness the sound reached him of the Sunnington clock striking the half hour. Halfpast eleven. He would wait till twelve before keeping his appointment with Minna. A mile up the Heath Road and a mile back would fill up the time. He walked on through the darkness, splashing through the mud and drawing his head down into the collar of his ulster so as to keep the frozen rain from his neck. Not a soul was visible. On his return he saw a bull’s-eye lantern flash within the grounds of a house. It was a policeman examining the fastenings. Hugh hurried on, turned down the lane that led from the Heath Road to the wood and waste lands behind The Lindens. At last he came to the brick wall enclosing the property. A key in his possession opened a small side door leading into a garden which Minna’s caprice had made so exclusively her own, that entrance to it was not practicable from any portion of the grounds. On the right were green-houses, closing off egress from the back-while, following the line of the side of the house, a thick box hedge ran to meet the front wall, and thus separated the little pleasance from the front lawn, through which curved the carriage drive.
The house was in total darkness, scarcely discernible against the pitch-black sky. Hugh crossed the turf, walking warily so as to avoid the shrubs with which it was thickly planted, ever and anon thrusting his hand through the icy, dripping foliage.
“Thank Heaven this is the last time,” he muttered to himself.
He came to the house, to whose walls stretched the carpet of turf. A low verandah, reached by a flight of steps, and communicating with the interior by means of French windows, now closely barred, extended not quite the breadth of the building. Masking its end rose a tall clipped yew. Behind this he crept, and a low window, whose sash he lifted, thanks to Minna’s previous unbarring, admitted him into the house. It was a tiny chamber, used by Minna as a dark-room during an intermittent photographic fever.