WHEN Charlie Kingsward fled from Oxford, half mad with disappointment
and misery, he had no idea or intention about the future left in his
mind. He had come to one of those strange passes in life beyond which
the imagination does not go. He had been rejected with that deepest
contumely which takes the aspect of the sweetest kindness, when a woman
affects the most innocent suspicion at the climax to which, consciously
or unconsciously, she has been working up.
“Oh, my poor boy, was that what you were thinking of?” There is no way
in which a blow can be administered with such sharp and keen effect. It
made the young man’s brain, which was only an ordinary brain, and for
some time had exercised but small restraining power upon him in the
hurry and sweep of his feelings, reel. When he pulled the door upon him
of those gardens of Aminda, that fool’s paradise in which he had been
wasting his youth, and which were represented in his case by a very
ordinary suburban garden in that part of Oxford called the Parks, his
rejected and disappointed passion had every possible auxiliary emotion
to make it unbearable. Keen mortification, humiliation, the sharp sense
of being mocked and deceived; the sudden conviction of having given what
seemed to the half-maddened boy his whole life, for nothing whipped him
like the lashes of the Furies. In most of the crises of life the thought
what to do next occurs with almost the rapidity of lightning after a
great catastrophe, but Charlie felt as if there was nothing beyond. The
whole world had crumbled about him. There was no next step; his very
fooling had failed him. He rushed back to his rooms by instinct, as a
wounded creature would rush to its lair, but on his way was met by eager
groups returning from the “Schools,” in which he ought to have been,
discussing among each other the stiffness of the papers, and how they
had been done. This would scarcely add to his pain, but it added to that
sickening effort of absolute failure of the demolition of everything
around and before him, which was what he felt the most. They made the
impossible more impossible still, and cut off every retreat. When he
stood in his room, amid all the useless books which he had not opened
for days or weeks, and heard the others mounting the staircase outside
his locked door, it seemed to the unhappy young man as though the floor
under his feet was the last spot on which standing ground was possible,
and that beyond and around there was nothing but chaos. For what reason
and on what impulse he rushed to London it would be difficult to tell.
He had little money, few friends--or rather none who were not also the
friends of his family--no idea or intention of doing anything.
“Perhaps the world will end to-night.”
He did not even think so much as that, though perhaps it was in some
sort the feeling in his mind. Yet no suggestions of suicide, or of
anything that constitutes a moral suicide, occurred to him. These would
have been something definite, they would have provided for a future, but
Charlie was stupefied and had none. He had not so much sense of any
resource as consisted in a pistol or a plunge into the river. He flung
himself into the train and went to London, because after a time the
sound of his comrades, or of those who ought to have been his comrades,
became intolerable to him. They kept pacing, rushing up and down the
staircase, calling to each other. One or two, indeed, talked at his own
closed door, driving him into a silent frenzy. As soon as they were gone
he seized a travelling bag, thrust something, he did not know what, into
it, and fled--to the desert--to London, where he would be lost and no
one would drive him frantic by calling to him, by making believe that
there was something left in life.
It occurred to him somehow, by force of that secondary consciousness
which works for us when our minds are past all exertion, to fling
himself into the corner of a third-class carriage as the place where he
was least likely to meet anyone he knew, though indeed the precaution
was scarcely necessary, since he could not have recognised anyone, as he
sat huddled up in his corner, staring blankly at the landscape that flew
past the window and seeing nothing. When he arrived in the midst of the
din and bustle of the great railway station, he fled once more through
the crowd into the greater crowd outside, clutching instinctively at the
bag which lay beside him, but seeing no one, nor whither he went nor
where he was going. He walked fast, and in a fierce unconsciousness
pushing his way through everything, and though he had in reality no aim,
took instinctively the way to his father’s house--his home--though it
was at that time no home for him, being occupied by strangers. When he
got into the park a vague recollection of this penetrated through the
maze in which he was enveloped, and for a moment he paused, but then
went on walking at the same pace, making the circuit of the park which
lay before him in the mists of the afternoon, the frosty sun setting,
the hay taking a rosy tint. He went all round the silences of the
half-deserted walks, beginning to feel vaguely the strange desolate
sentiment of not knowing where to go, though only in the secondary phase
of his consciousness. Until all at once his strength seemed to fail him,
his limbs grew feeble, his steps slow, and he stopped short,
mechanically, as he had walked, not knowing why, and flung himself upon
a bench, where he sat long, motionless, as if that had now become the
only thing solid in the world and there was no step remaining to him
beyond.
A young man, though he may have numberless friends, may yet make a
despairing transit like this from one place to another through the midst
of a crowd without being seen by anyone who knows him; if the encounters
of life are wonderful, the failures to encounter, the manner in which we
walk alone with friends on all hands, and in our desperate moments, when
help is most necessary, do not meet or come within sight of any, is
equally wonderful. The Kingswards had a large circle of acquaintance,
and Charlie himself had the numberless intimates of a public school boy,
a young university man, acquainted with half the youth of his
period--yet nobody saw him, except one to whom he would scarcely have
accorded a salutation in ordinary circumstances. Aubrey Leigh, who had
been so strangely and closely connected for a moment with the Kingsward
family, and then so swiftly and peremptorily cut off, arrived in London
from a short visit to a suburban house by the same train which brought
Charlie, and caught sight of him as he jumped out of his compartment
with his bag in his hand. A very cool, self-possessed, and trim young
man young Kingsward had always appeared to the other, with whose
brightest and at the same time most painful recollections his figure was
so connected. To see him now suddenly, with that air of desperation
which had triumphed over all his natural habits and laws, that
abstracted look, clutching his bag, half leaping, half stumbling out of
the carriage, going off at a swift, unconscious pace, pushing through
every crowd, filled Aubrey with surprise which soon turned into anxiety.
Charlie Kingsward, with a bag in his hand, rushing through the London
streets conveyed an entirely new idea to the minds of the spectators.
What such an arrival would have meant in ordinary circumstances would
have been the rattling up of a hansom, the careless calling out of an
address, the noisy progress over the stones, of the driver expectant of
something more than his fare, and keenly cognisant of the habits of the
young gentlemen from Oxford.
Aubrey quickened his own pace to follow the other, whose arrival this
time was in such different guise. A sudden terror seized his mind,
naturally quite unjustified by the outward circumstances. Was anyone
ill?--which meant, was Bee ill? Had anything dreadful happened? A
moment’s reflection would have shown that in such a case the hansom
would be more needed than usual, as conveying her brother the more
quickly to his home. But Aubrey did not pause on probabilities. A moment
more would have made him sure of the unlikelihood that Charlie would be
sent for in case of Bee’s illness, unless, indeed, the question had been
one of life and death.
But he had not even heard of his love for many months. His heart was
hungry for news of her, and in that case he would have done his best to
intercept Charlie, to extract from him, if possible, some news of his
sister. He followed, accordingly, with something of the same headlong
haste with which Charlie was pushing through the streets, and for a long
time, up to the gates of the park, indeed, kept him in sight. At the
rate at which the young man was going it was impossible to do more.
Then Aubrey suddenly lost sight of the figure he was pursuing. There was
a group of people collected for some vulgar, unsupportable object or
other at that point, and it was there that Charlie deflected from the
straight road for home, which he had hitherto taken, and which his
pursuer took it for granted he would follow for the rest of the way.
When Aubrey had pushed his way through the little crowd Charlie was no
longer visible. He looked to left and to right in vain, scrutinised the
short cut over the park, and the broad road full of passing carriages
and wayfarers, but saw no trace of the figure he sought. Aubrey then
walked quickly to the point where Charlie, as he supposed, must be
going, and soon came to the gate on the other side and the street itself
in which the house of the Kingswards was. But he saw no sign of Charlie,
nor of anyone looking for him. He himself had no acquaintance with that
house, to which he had never been admitted, but he had passed it many
times in the vain hope of seeing Bee at a window, not knowing that it
was occupied by strangers. While he walked down the street, however,
anxiously gazing to see if there were any signs of illness, asking
himself whether he dared to inquire at the door, he saw a gentleman come
up and enter with a latch key, who certainly did not belong to the
Kingsward family. This changed the whole current of Aubrey’s thoughts.
It was not here then that Charlie was coming. His rapid and wild walk
could not mean any disaster to the family--any trouble to Bee.
The discovery was at once a disappointment and a relief; a relief from
the anxiety which had gradually been gaining upon him, a disappointment
of the hope of hearing something of her. For if Charlie was not going
home, who could trace out where such a young man might be going? To the
dogs, Aubrey thought, instinctively; to the devil, to judge by his
looks. Yet Charlie Kingsward, the most correct of modern young men, had
surely in him no natural proclivity towards that facile descent. What
could it be that had driven him along like a leaf before the wind?
Aubrey was himself greatly disturbed and stirred up by this encounter.
He had schooled himself to quiet, and the pangs of his overthrow, though
not quenched, had been kept under with a strong hand. The life which he
desired for himself, which he had so fully planned, so warmly hoped for,
had been broken to pieces and made an end of, leaving the way he had
chosen blank to him, as he thought, for evermore. He had been very
unfortunate in that way, his early venture ending in bitter
disappointment; his other, more wise, more sweet, cut off before it had
ever been. But he was a reasonable being, and knew that life had to be
put to other uses, even when that sole fair path which the heart desired
was closed. He had given it up definitely, neither thinking nor hoping
again for the household life, the patriarchal existence among his own
fields, his own people, under his own roof, and was now doing his best
to conform his life to a more grey and monotonous standard.
But the sight of Charlie, or rather the sight of Bee’s brother,
evidently under the influence of some strong feeling, and utterly
carried away by it so as to ignore all that regard for appearance and
decorum which had been his leading principle, came suddenly like a touch
upon a wound, reviving all the questions and impatiences of the past.
Aubrey felt that he could not endure the ignorance of her and all her
ways which had fallen over him like a pall, cutting off her being from
him as if they were not still living in the same world, still within
reach of each other. He might endure, he said to himself, to be parted
from her, to give up hope of her, since she willed it so--yet, at
least, he must know something of her, find out if she were ill or well,
what she was doing, where she was even; for that mere outside detail he
did not know. How was it possible he should bear this--not even to know
where she was? This thought took hold of him, and drove him into a fever
of sudden feeling. Oh! yes; he had resigned himself to live without her,
to endure his solitary existence far from her, since she willed it so;
but not even to know where she was, how she was, what she was doing!
Suddenly, in a moment, the fiery stinging came back, the sword plunged
into the wound. He had not for a moment deluded himself with the idea
that he was cured of it, but yet it had been subdued by necessity, by
the very silence which now he felt to be intolerable. He went back into
the park, where the long lines of the misty paths were now almost
deserted, gleams of the lamps outside shining through the dark tracery
of the branches, and all quiet except in the broad road, still sounding
with a diminished stream of carriages. He dived into the intersections
of the deserted paths, something as Charlie had done, seeking
instinctively a silent place where he could be alone with the
newly-aroused torment of his thoughts.
When he came suddenly upon the bench upon which Charlie had flung
himself, his first movement was to turn back. He had been walking over
the grass, and his steps were consequently noiseless, and he was in the
mood to which any human presence--the possible encounter of anyone who
might speak to him and disturb his own hurrying passions--was
intolerable. But as he turned, his eye fell on the bag--the dusty,
half-empty thing still clutched by a hand that seemed more or less
unconscious. This insignificant detail arrested Aubrey. He moved a
little way, keeping on the grass, to get a fuller view of the
half-reclining figure. And then he made out in the partial light that it
was the same figure which he had pursued so long.
What was Charlie doing here in this secluded spot--he, the most unlike
any such retirement, the well-equipped, confident, prosperous young man
of the world, subject to so few delusions, knowing his way so well, both
in the outer and the inner world?
Aubrey was more startled than tongue can tell. He thought no longer of
family disaster, of illness, or trouble. Whatever was amiss, it was
evidently Charlie who was the sufferer. He paused for a minute or more,
reflecting what he should do. Then he stepped forward upon the gravel,
and sitting down, put his hand suddenly upon that which held the
half-filled bag.
“Kingsward!” he said.