Until the actual moment of their parting at Euston, Saxham had never fully
realised the anguish of the last moment when Lynette's face should pass
for ever out of his thirsting sight.
It was going.... He quickened his long strides to keep up with it. He must
have called to her, for she came hurriedly to the corridor-window, her
sweet cheeks suffused with lovely glowing colour, her sweet eyes shining,
her small gloved hand held frankly out. He gripped it, uttered some
incoherency--what, he could not remember--was shouted at by a porter with
a greasy lamp-truck, cannoned heavily against a man with a basket of
papers, awakened with a great pang to the knowledge that she was gone. And
the great, bare, dirty, populous glass-hive of Euston, that has been the
forcing-house of so many sorrowful partings, held another breaking heart.
In the days that followed he saw his private patients as usual, and
operated upon a regular mid-week morning at St. Stephen's, whose senior
surgeon had recently resigned. The rest of the time he spent in making his
arrangements.
Sanely, logically, methodically, everything had been thought out. Major
Wrynche was to be her guardian, co-trustee with Lord Castleclare, and
executor of the Will. It left her, simply and unconditionally, everything
of which Saxham was possessed. She would live with the Wrynches until she
married again. His agents were instructed to find a tenant for the house,
and privately a purchaser for the practice. They wrote to him of a client
already found. Matters were progressing steadily. Very soon now the
desired end.
His table-lamp burned through the nights as he made up his ledgers and
settled his accounts. In leisure moments he read in the intolerable book
of the Past. Of all its sorrows and failures, its frantic follies and its
besotted sins. Memory omitted nothing. Not a blot upon those sordid pages
was spared him. It was not possible for an instant to turn away his eyes.
His mental clarity was unrelieved by weariness. No shadow dimmed the keen
crystal of his brain. He was at tension, like a bowstring that is
stretched continually. He realised this, thinking: "Presently I will cut
the bow-string, and the bow shall have rest! Even if my once-boasted
will-power reasserted itself--even if I rose triumphant for the second
time, cured of my vile craving, I do not the less owe my debt to the woman
I have married. I promised her that I would die rather than fail her. I
failed her! There is no excuse!"