Thus, whatever wild, uncontrollable hopes were newly born at the first sight of him, they were frozen at once to death. She went home in a furious rage of humiliation. He was a man of ice and steel, an automaton equipped with an intellect, scarcely a man at all. She put an imperious end to her doubts.
Roderick Usher called next day, and spoke as one inspired with lofty ideals. Before her fascinated vision he seemed to place realities where hitherto the void had yawned or shadows at the most had shimmered. Life stretched infinitely in front of her, a lush garden, fertile with a myriad beauties. Her expanding soul shone out of dewy eyes. All the blindness, all the weakness, all the deluded nobility of her nature, lay revealed, pathetically defenceless. It was Roderick's golden hour, when he knew that he had her at his mercy.
He rose, flung out his arms in a passionate gesture.
“Come to me, Ella. Our destinies demand it.”
She too rose and faced him, her eyes shining like stars, and held out her hands.
“Yes, I will come,” she said.
Roderick went into the warm June sunshine, thrilled with triumph, holding his head high. He walked along heedless of direction, turned into Hans Place and completed an entire circuit of the gardens before he realised what he had done. He paused, to think of some destination. Then he laughed aloud.
“Roderick, you must be in love,” he said to himself. A long struggle with fortune had rendered it a rare occurrence for Roderick not to be perfectly aware of what he was doing and of what he was about to do. But the victory had come sooner than he had anticipated, and his immediate scheme of life, was thrown into confusion. He turned to the right, and once in Sloane Street, wandered north and found himself again undetermined at the corner of the Brompton Road. The driver of a crawling hansom touched his hat inquiringly. It was a brand-new, summer season cab, with horse and driver well turned out, and it caught his fancy. He stood upon the step, looked east, looked west, up and down the surging thoroughfare. Then obeying a sudden impulse, he shouted laughingly an address over the hood of the cab,—“24 Weymouth Street.”
He would go and present himself to an astonished Sylvester, acquaint him with his good fortune, and perhaps learn certain things concerning which delicacy had forbidden him to make too close inquiries. At any rate, there was a certain attractive impudence in the adventure. He lit a cigar and lay back on the soft cushions of the cab and regarded himself complacently in the strip of mirror. He was wearing well, he thought, as he caressed his Vandyke beard, and appeared by no means an unromantic lover. The deepening crows' feet about his eyes gave him a momentary uneasiness, but he parted his lips, and by way of compensation looked admiringly at his white, even teeth. The conviction that there was nothing about him that would be otherwise than physically attractive to the most fastidious feminine sense brought him an assured content.
He gazed through the blue cigar-smoke up the long vista of clashing traffic broadening out by Hyde Park Corner, where London at its gayest displayed itself in the mellow afternoon sunlight. He waved his hand towards it as if summoning its blithe spirit to hear him.