The end was that he took his portmanteau, which had not been unpacked, and threw it into a passing cab, and went off to the railway. He had not gone home since he came to his clerkship in the bank, and that was three months since. It seemed the only thing that was left for him to do now. He went back along the familiar road with something of the feelings of a prodigal approaching his home. It seemed strange to him when the porter at the little roadside station of Fanshawe touched his cap, and announced his intention of carrying Mr John’s portmanteau to the Rectory. He felt it strange that the poor fellow should remember him. Surely it was years since he had been there before.
And this feeling grew as John walked slowly along the quiet country road that led to his home. Everything he passed was associated with thoughts which were as much over and gone as if they had happened in a different existence. He had walked along by these hedgerows pondering a thousand things, but scarcely one that had any reference to, any relation with, his present life. He had been a dreamer, planning high things for the welfare of the world; he had been a reformer, rousing, sometimes tenderly, sometimes violently, the indifferent country from its slumbers; sometimes, even, retiring to the prose of things, he had tried to realise the details of a clergyman’s work, and to fit himself into them, and ask himself how he should perform them. But never, in all these questionings, had he thought of himself as a banker’s clerk--a man working for money alone, and the hope of money. It was so strange that he did not know what to make of it. As he went on, the other John, his former self, seemed to go with him--and which was the real man, and which the phantom, he could not tell. All the quiet country lifted prevailing hands, and laid hold on him as he went home. It looked so natural--and he, what was he? But the country, too, had changed as if in a dream. He had left it in the full blaze of June, and now it was October, with the leaves in autumn glory, the fields reaped, the brown stubble everywhere, and now and then in the clear blue air the crack of a sportsman’s gun. All these things had borne a different aspect once to John. He too had been a little of a sportsman, as was natural; but the dog and the gun did not harmonise with the figure of a banker’s clerk. The women on the road, who stared at him, and curtsied to him with a smile of recognition, confused him, he could not tell why. It was so strange that everybody should recognise him--he who did not recognise himself.