ALL was quiet at Thorpe Ambrose. The hall was solitary, the rooms
were dark. The servants, waiting for the supper hour in the
garden at the back of the house, looked up at the clear heaven
and the rising moon, and agreed that there was little prospect
of the return of the picnic party until later in the night. The
general opinion, led by the high authority of the cook, predicted
that they might all sit down to supper without the least fear of
being disturbed by the bell. Having arrived at this conclusion, the servants assembled round the table, and exactly at the moment when they sat down the bell rang.
The footman, wondering, went up stairs to open the door, and found to his astonishment Midwinter waiting alone on the threshold, and looking (in the servant's opinion) miserably ill. He asked for a light, and, saying he wanted nothing else, withdrew at once to his room. The footman went back to his fellow-servants, and reported that something had certainly happened to his master's friend.
On entering his room, Midwinter closed the door, and hurriedly
filled a bag with the necessaries for traveling. This done, he
took from a locked drawer, and placed in the breast pocket of his
coat, some little presents which Allan had given him—a cigar
case, a purse, and a set of studs in plain gold. Having possessed
himself of these memorials, he snatched up the bag and laid his
hand on the door. There, for the first time, he paused. There, the headlong haste of all his actions thus far suddenly ceased, and the hard despair in his face began to soften: he waited, with the door in his hand.
Up to that moment he had been conscious of but one motive that
animated him, but one purpose that he was resolute to achieve. "For Allan's sake!" he had said to himself, when he looked back toward the fatal landscape and saw his friend leaving him to meet the woman at the pool. "For Allan's sake!" he had said again, when he crossed the open country beyond the wood, and saw afar, in the gray twilight, the long line of embankment and the distant glimmer of the railway lamps beckoning him away already to the iron road.
It was only when he now paused before he closed the door behind
him—it was only when his own impetuous rapidity of action came
for the first time to a check, that the nobler nature of the man
rose in protest against the superstitious despair which was
hurrying him from all that he held dear. His conviction of the
terrible necessity of leaving Allan for Allan's good had not been
shaken for an instant since he had seen the first Vision of the
Dream realized on the shores of the Mere. But now, for the first
time, his own heart rose against him in unanswerable rebuke. "Go, if you must and will! but remember the time when you were ill, and he sat by your bedside; friendless, and he opened his heart to you—and write, if you fear to speak; write and ask him to forgive you, before you leave him forever!"
The half-opened door closed again softly. Midwinter sat down at
the writing-table and took up the pen.
He tried again and again, and yet again, to write the farewell
words; he tried, till the floor all round him was littered with
torn sheets of paper. Turn from them which way he would, the old
times still came back and faced him reproachfully. The spacious
bed-chamber in which he sat, narrowed, in spite of him, to the
sick usher's garret at the west-country inn. The kind hand that
had once patted him on the shoulder touched him again; the kind
voice that had cheered him spoke unchangeably in the old friendly
tones. He flung his arms on the table and dropped his head on
them in tearless despair. The parting words that his tongue was
powerless to utter his pen was powerless to write. Mercilessly in
earnest, his superstition pointed to him to go while the time was
his own. Mercilessly in earnest, his love for Allan held him back
till the farewell plea for pardon and pity was written.