Home Again Part 15

"I was foolishly paralyzed for a moment," said Walter, "as well as unprepared for the part you would take."

"I am very glad, Mr. Colman," said Sefton, "that you have had the opportunity of discovering the truth! My cousin well deserves the pillory in which I know you will not place her!"

"Lady Lufa needs fear nothing from me. I have some regard left for the idea of her--the thing she is not! If you will be kind, come and help me out of the house."

"There is no train to-night."

"I will wait at the station for the slow train."

"I can not press you to stay an hour where you have been so treated, but--"

"It is high time I went!" said Walter--not without the dignity that endurance gives. "May I ask you to do one thing for me, Mr. Sefton?"

"Twenty things, if I can."

"Then please send my portmanteau after me."

With that he left the room, and went to his own, far on the way of cure, though not quite so far as he imagined. The blood, however, was surging healthily through his veins: he had been made a fool of, but he would be a wiser man for it!

He had hardly closed his door when Sefton appeared.

"Can I help you?" he said.

"To pack my portmanteau? Did you ever pack your own?"

"Oftener than you, I suspect! I never had but one orderly I could bear about me, and he's dead, poor fellow! I shall see him again, though, I do trust, let believers in dirt say what they will! Never till I myself think no more, will I cease hoping to see my old Archie again! Fellows must learn something through the Lufas, or they would make raving maniacs of us! G.o.d be thanked, he has her in his great idiot-cage, and will do something with her yet! May you and I be there to see when she comes out in her right mind!"

"Amen!" said Walter.

"And now, my dear fellow," said Sefton, "if you will listen to me, you will not go till to-morrow morning. No, I don't want you to stay to breakfast! You shall go by the early train as any other visitor might.

The least sc.r.a.p of a note to Lady Tremaine, and all will go without remark."

He waited in silence. Walter went on putting up his things.

"I dare say you are right!" he said at length. "I will stay till the morning. But you will not ask me to go down again?"

"It would be a victory if you could."

"Very well, I will. I am a fool, but this much less of a fool, that I know I am one."

Somehow Walter had a sense of relief. He began to dress, and spent some pains on the process. He felt sure Sefton would take care the "Onlooker"

should not be seen--before his departure anyhow. During dinner he talked almost brilliantly, making Lufa open her eyes without knowing she did.

He retired at length to his room with very mingled feelings. There was the closing paragraph of the most interesting chapter of his life yet constructed! What was to follow?

Into the gulf of an empty heart Something must always come.

"What will it be?" I think with a start, And a fear that makes me dumb.

I can not sit at my outer gate And call what shall soothe my grief; I can not unlock to a king in state, Can not bar a wind-swept leaf!

Hopeless were I if a loving Care Sat not at the spring of my thought-- At the birth of my history, blank and bare.

Of the thing I have not wrought.

If G.o.d were not, this hollow need.

All that I now call _me_, Might wallow with demons of hate and greed In a lawless and sh.o.r.eless sea!

Watch the door of this sepulcher, Sit, my Lord, on the stone, Till the life within it rise and stir.

And walk forth to claim its own.

This was how Walter felt and wrote some twelve months after, when he had come to understand a little of the process that had been conducted in him; when he knew that the life he had been living was a mere life in death, a being not worth being.

But the knowledge of this process had not yet begun. A thousand subtle influences, wrapped in the tattered cloak of dull old Time, had to come into secret, potent play, ere he would be able to write thus.

And even this paragraph was not yet quite at an end.

CHAPTER XXV.

A MIDNIGHT INTERVIEW.

Walter drew his table near the fire, and sat down to concoct a brief note of thanks and farewell to his hostess, informing her that he was compelled to leave in haste. He found it rather difficult, though what Lufa might tell her mother he neither thought nor cared, if only he had his back to the house, and his soul out of it. It was now the one place on the earth which he would sink in the abyss of forgetfulness.

He could not get the note to his mind, falling constantly into thought that led nowhither, and at last threw himself back in his chair, wearied with the emotions of the day. Under the soothing influence of the heat and the lambent motions of the flames, he fell into a condition which was not sleep, and as little was waking. His childhood crept back to him, with all the delights of the sacred time when home was the universe, and father and mother the divinities that filled it. A something now vanished from his life, looked at him across a gulf of lapse, and said, "Am I likewise false? The present you desire to forget; you say, it were better it had never been: do you wish I too had never been? Why else have you left my soul in the grave of oblivion?" Thus talking with his past, he fell asleep.

It could have been but for a few minutes, though when he awoke it seemed a century had pa.s.sed, he had dreamed of so much. But something had happened! What was it? The fire was blazing as before, but he was chilled to the marrow! A wind seemed blowing upon him, cold as if it issued from the jaws of the sepulcher! His imagination and memory together linked the time to the night of Sefton's warning: was the ghost now really come? Had Sefton's presence only saved him from her for the time? He sat bolt upright in his chair listening, the same horror upon him as then. It seemed minutes he thus sat motionless, but moments of fearful expectation are long drawn out; their nature is of centuries, not years. One thing was certain, and one only--that there was a wind, and a very cold one, blowing upon him. He stared at the door. It moved.

It opened a little. A light tap followed. He could not speak. Then came a louder, and the spell was broken. He started to his feet, and with the courage of terror extreme, opened the door--not opened it a little, as if he feared an unwelcome human presence, but pulled it, with a sudden wide yawn, open as the grave!

There stood no bodiless soul, but soulless Lufa!

He stood aside, and invited her to enter. Little as he desired to see her, it was a relief that it was she, and not an elderly lady in brown silk, through whose person you might thrust your hand without injury or offense.

As a reward of his prompt.i.tude in opening the door, he caught sight of Lady Tremaine disappearing in the corridor.

Lady Lufa walked in without a word, and Walter followed her, leaving the door wide. She seated herself in the chair he had just left, and turned to him with a quiet, magisterial air, as if she sat on the seat of judgment.

"You had better shut the door," she said.

"I thought Lady Tremaine might wish to hear," answered Walter.

"Not at all. She only lighted me to the door."

"As you please," said Walter, and having done as she requested, returned, and stood before her.

"Will you not take a seat?" she said, in the tone of--"You may sit down."

"Your ladys.h.i.+p will excuse me!" he answered.