The weather was settled, and he anticipated a successful run. He was tired of London. There was heavy over him a sense of things about to happen. Matters seemed coming to a head. What his foreboding meant he could not tell; he had put the old uncle’s vague prophecies far away at the back of his consciousness, and attributed the oppression that crushed his spirits with a weight of impending catastrophe entirely to the influences of the thunderous weather and the air of London, stale and exhausted by the season. It was with relief that he got into the car on a radiant morning, and set out on his flight from the sultry city.
But the day’s journey was not prosperously made. The roads were dusty, the wind was baffling, the car went peevishly and ill. Panting heavily along, the machine traversed the beautiful heaths and uplands that lie to the west of London. Kingston had meant to break his journey far on the way. It was necessary that he should arrive at Brakelond in good time on the morrow, seeing that this festivity over which Gundred so fussed was due to take place that evening. And so, the distance down to the West being great, Kingston had planned to spend the necessarily intervening night at Salisbury, so as to give himself ample time to make the rest of the journey. However, after the long, unsatisfactory day of delays, a downright catastrophe at last brought him to a standstill, no farther advanced upon his pilgrimage than Basingstoke. In that once placid but now assertive little metropolis, hallowed at once by the memories of Mad Margaret and of Elizabeth Bennet, Kingston found himself forced to make his rest that night. He gave orders for an early start on the morrow, then wandered out from the grim desolation peculiar to English country hotels into the streets and market-place. Roaming from alley to alley, he contrasted old with new, and beneath the walls of the old Assembly Rooms, bent his mind to see the famous Ball where Darcy first sighted his destiny. Soon, within the old room above, barnlike now and desolate, ghostly lights were shining, and the tinkle of long-dead music was blending with the rhythmical tumult of many feet. Brilliant and entrancing, Elizabeth came and went, up and down the dance; Mary posed and minced, Kitty and Lydia were agog for partners. As the stranger outside stood and recalled that immortal scene, the visible world around him faded quickly away, and again he understood how much more real may be that which has no earthly existence than that which earthly hands may touch and earthly eyes examine. Streets and walls of Basingstoke, hideous clock-tower and town-hall--it was not that they were real; they were phantoms of an ugly hour; reality, for evermore, was that little town which never was and never will be, where dwelt those men and women that never lived on earth, and yet must live eternally--those men and women so far more vivid and lasting than the ghosts amid whom we live; those real men and women whose voices must ring on perennially down the ages, giving joy and satisfaction to generation after generation, until the English language has passed with Nineveh and Babylon into the limbo of things forgotten.