"I have read my letter over to myself, Berenice, and I fear that it must sound to you very commonplace, even perhaps cold! Yet, believe me when I tell you that I have passed through a very fire of suffering, and if I am calm now it is with the calm of an ineffable despair! In my life at Oxford, and later, here in London, women have never borne any share. Part of my scheme of living has been to regard them as something outside my little cycle, an influence great indeed, but one which had passed me by.
"Yet I am now one of the world's great sufferers, one of those who have found at once their greatest joy linked with an unutterable despair. For I love you, Berenice! Never doubt it! Though I should never look upon your face again--which God in His mercy forbid--my love for you must be for ever a part and the greatest part of my life! Always remember that, I pray you!
"It seems strange to talk of one's plans with such a great, black cloud of sorrow filling the air! But the outward form of life does not change, even when the light has gone out and one's heart is broken! I have some work before me which I must finish; when it is over I shall go abroad! But that can wait! When you are back in London, send for me! I am schooling myself to meet a new Berenice--my friend! And I have something still more to say to you!
The week that followed the sending of his letter was, to Matravers, with his love for equable times and emotions, like a week in hell! He had set himself a task not easy even to an ordinary man of business, but to him trebly difficult and harassing. Day after day he spent in the city--a somewhat strange visitor there, with his grave, dignified manner and studied fastidiousness of dress and deportment. He was unversed in the ways of the men with whom he had to deal, and he had no commercial aptitude whatever. But in a quiet way he was wonderfully persistent, and he succeeded better, perhaps, than any other emissary whom John Drage could have employed. The sum of money which he eventually collected amounted to nearly fifteen hundred pounds, and late one evening he started for Kensington with a bundle of papers under his arm and a cheque-book in his pocket.
It was his last visit,--at any rate, for the present,--he told himself with a sense of wonderful relief, as he walked through the Park in the gathering twilight. For of late, something in connection with his day's efforts had taken him every evening to the shabby little house at Kensington, where his coming was eagerly welcomed by the tired, sick man and the lonely boy. He had esteemed himself a man well schooled in all manner of self-control, and little to be influenced in a matter of duty by his personal likes and dislikes. But these visits were a torture to him! To sit and talk for hours with a man, grateful enough, but peevish and commonplace, and with a curious lack of virility or self-reliance in his untoward circumstances, was trial enough to Matravers, who had been used to select his associates and associations with delicate and close care. But to remember that this man had been, and indeed was, the husband of Berenice, was madness! It was this man, whom at the best he could only regard with a kindly and gentle contempt, who stood between him and such surprising happiness, this man and the boy with his pale, serious face and dark eyes. And the bitterness of fate--for he never realized that it would have been possible for him to have acted otherwise--had made him their benefactor!