He was, for an instant, close to her, close; and he seemed to have an overwhelmingly intimate glimpse into her secrets; he seemed to be choked in the sudden strong emotion of that crape.
He felt queer.
"Here you are, sir!
Second smoker!" called the porter.
The daily frequenters of the train boarded it with their customary disgust.
"I'll write as soon as ever I get there!" said Cyril, of his own accord.
It was the best he could muster.
With what grace he raised his hat!
A sliding-away; clouds of steam; and she shared the dead platform with milk-cans, two porters, and Smith's noisy boy!
She walked home, very slowly and painfully.
The lump of lead was heavier than ever before.
And the townspeople saw the proudest mother in Bursley walking home.
"After all," she argued with her soul angrily, petulantly, "could you expect the boy to do anything else?
He is a serious student, he has had a brilliant success, and is he to be tied to your apron-strings?
The idea is preposterous.
It isn't as if he was an idler, or a bad son.
No mother could have a better son.
A nice thing, that he should stay all his life in Bursley simply because you don't like being left alone!"
Unfortunately one might as well argue with a mule as with one's soul.
Her soul only kept on saying monotonously:
"I'm a lonely old woman now.
I've nothing to live for any more, and I'm no use to anybody.
Once I was young and proud.
And this is what my life has come to!
This is the end!"
When she reached home, Amy had not touched the breakfast things; the carpet was still wrinkled, and the mat still out of place.
And, through the desolating atmosphere of reaction after a terrific crisis, she marched directly upstairs, entered his plundered room, and beheld the disorder of the bed in which he had slept.
BOOK III SOPHIA
CHAPTER I
THE ELOPEMENT
I
Her soberly rich dress had a countrified air, as she waited, ready for the streets, in the bedroom of the London hotel on the afternoon of the first of July, 1866; but there was nothing of the provincial in that beautiful face, nor in that bearing at once shy and haughty; and her eager heart soared beyond geographical boundaries.
It was the Hatfield Hotel, in Salisbury Street, between the Strand and the river.
Both street and hotel are now gone, lost in the vast foundations of the Savoy and the Cecil; but the type of the Hatfield lingers with ever-increasing shabbiness in Jermyn Street.
In 1866, with its dark passages and crooked stairs, its candles, its carpets and stuffs which had outlived their patterns, its narrow dining-room where a thousand busy flies ate together at one long table, its acrid stagnant atmosphere, and its disturbing sensation of dirt everywhere concealing itself, it stood forth in rectitude as a good average modern hotel.
The patched and senile drabness of the bedroom made an environment that emphasized Sophia's flashing youth.
She alone in it was unsullied.
There was a knock at the door, apparently gay and jaunty.
But she thought, truly:
"He's nearly as nervous as I am!"
And in her sick nervousness she coughed, and then tried to take full possession of herself.
The moment had at last come which would divide her life as a battle divides the history of a nation.
Her mind in an instant swept backwards through an incredible three months.
The schemings to obtain and to hide Gerald's letters at the shop, and to reply to them!
The far more complex and dangerous duplicity practised upon her majestic aunt at Axe!
The visits to the Axe post-office!
The three divine meetings with Gerald at early morning by the canal-feeder, when he had told her of his inheritance and of the harshness of his uncle Boldero, and with a rush of words had spread before her the prospect of eternal bliss!
The nights of fear!
The sudden, dizzy acquiescence in his plan, and the feeling of universal unreality which obsessed her!
The audacious departure from her aunt's, showering a cascade of appalling lies!