Ashley's craving was for space and air. He felt choked, strangled. There
was a high wind blowing, carrying a sleety rain. It was a physical
comfort to turn into the teeth of it.
He took a road straggling out of the town toward the remoter suburbs,
and so into the country. He marched on, his eyes unseeing, his mouth set
grimly--goaded by a kind of frenzy to run away from that which he knew
he could not leave behind. It was like fleeing from something
omnipresent. Though he should turn his back on it never so sternly and
travel never so fast, it would be with him. It had already entered into
his life as a constituent element; he could no more get rid of it than
of his breath or his blood.
And yet the thing itself eluded him. In the very attempt to apprehend it
by sight or name, he found it mysteriously beyond his grasp. It was like
an enemy in the air, deadly but out of reach. It had struck him, though
he could not as yet tell where. He could only stride onward through the
wind and rain, as a man who has been shot can ride on till he falls.
So he tramped for an hour or more, finding himself at last amid bleak,
dreary marshes, over which the November twilight was coming down. He
felt lonely, desolate, far from his familiar things, far from home. His
familiar things were his ambitions, as home was that life of
well-ordered English dignity, in which to-morrow will bear some relation
to to-day.
He felt used up by the succession of American shocks, of American
violences. They had reduced him to a condition of bewilderment. For four
or five weeks he had scarcely known from minute to minute where he
stood. He had maintained his ground as best he was able, holding out for
the moment when he could marry his wife and go his way; and now, when
ostensibly the hour had come in which to do it, it was only that he
might see confusion worse confounded.
He turned back toward the town. He did so with a feeling of futility in
the act. Where should he go? What should he do? How was he to deal with
this new, extraordinary feature in the case? It was impossible to return
to Tory Hill, as if the Marquise had told him nothing, and equally
impossible to make what she had said a point of departure for anything
else. If he made it a point of departure for anything at all, it could
only be for a step which his whole being rebelled against taking.
It was a solution of the instant's difficulties to avoid the turning to
Tory Hill and go on to Drusilla Fane's. In the wind and rain and
gathering darkness the thought of her fireside was cheering. She would
understand him, too. She had always understood him. It was her knowledge
of the English point of view that made her such an efficient pal.
During all the trying four or five weeks through which he had passed she
had been able to give him sympathetic support just where and when he
needed it. It was something to know she would give it to him again.
As he told her of Davenant's journey to France he could see her eyes
grow bigger and blacker than ever in the flickering firelight. She kept
them on him all the while he talked. She kept them on him as from time
to time she lifted her cup and sipped her tea.
"Then that's why he didn't answer mother's letters," she said, absently,
when he had finished. "He wasn't there."
"He wasn't there, by Jove! And don't you see what a fix he's put me in?"