And so, in fact, the fantastically absurd prevailed. Before the Unwritten Law, mainly promulgated and enforced by Risca himself, which guarded the sea-chamber against pain and sorrow, the driving Furies slunk with limp wing and nerveless claw. And one day Risca was surprised at finding himself undriven. Indeed, he was somewhat disconcerted. He fell into a bad temper. The Furies are highly aristocratic divinities who don't worry about Tom, Dick, or Harry, but choose an Orestes at least for their tormenting; so that, when they give up their pursuit of a Risca, he may excusably regard it as a personal slight. It was the morose and gloomy nature of the man.
“I know I 'm a fool,” he said to Herold, when every one had gone to bed, “but I can't help it. Any normal person would regard me as insane if I told him I was stopped from saving the wreck of my career by consideration for the temporary comfort of a bedridden chit of a girl half my age, who is absolutely nothing to me in the world (her uncle married my first cousin. If that is anything of a family tie, I'm weak on family feeling); but that's God's truth. I'm tied by her to this accursed country. She just holds me down in the hell of London, and I can't wriggle away. It's senseless, I know it is. Sometimes when I 'm away from her, walking on the beach, I feel I 'd like to throw the whole of this confounded house into the sea; and then I look up and see the light in her room, and—I—I just begin to wonder whether she 's asleep and what she's dreaming of. There 's some infernal witchcraft about the child.”
“There is,” said Herold.
“Rot!” said Risca, his pugnacious instincts awakened by the check on his dithyrambics. “The whole truth of the matter is that I'm simply a sentimental fool.”
“All honour to you, John,” said Herold.
“If you talk like that, I 'll wring your neck,” said Risca, pausing for à second in his walk up and down Sir Oliver's library, and glaring down at his friend, who reclined on the sofa and regarded him with a smile exasperatingly wise. “You know I'm a fool, and why can't you say it? A man at my time of life! Do you realize that I am twice her age?”
And he went on, inveighing now against the pitifully human conventions that restrained him from hurting the chit of a child, and now against the sorcery with which she contrived to invest the chamber wherein she dwelt.
“And at my age, too, when I 've run the whole gamut of human misery, the whole discordant thing—toute la lyre—when I've finished with the blighting illusion that men call life; when, confound it! I 'm thirty.”
Sir Oliver, unable to sleep, came into the room in dressing-gown and slippers. He looked very fragile and broken.
“Here 's John,” laughed Herold, “saying that he 's thirty, and an old, withered man, and he 's not thirty. He 's nine-and-twenty.”