The bright sunshine dazzled his eyes, the passing vehicles and foot-passengers startled and bewildered him. He shrank into a by-street, and put his hand over his eyes. "I'd better go home,"he thought, "and shut myself up, and think about it in my own room."His lodging was in a small house, in the poor quarter of the town. He let himself in with his key, and stole softly upstairs The one little room he possessed met him cruelly, look round it where he might, with silent memorials of Miss Gwilt. On the chimney-piece were the flowers she had given him at various times, all withered long since, and all preserved on a little china pedestal, protected by a glass shade. On the wall hung a wretched colored print of a woman, which he had caused to be nicely framed and glazed, because there was a look in it that reminded him of her face. In his clumsy old mahogany writing-desk were the few letters, brief and peremptory, which she had written to him at the time when he was watching and listening meanly at Thorpe Ambrose to please _her._ And when, turning his back on these, he sat down wearily on his sofa-bedstead--there, hanging over one end of it, was the gaudy cravat of blue satin, which he had bought because she had told him she liked bright colors, and which he had never yet had the courage to wear, though he had taken it out morning after morning with the resolution to put it on! Habitually quiet in his actions, habitually restrained in his language, he now seized the cravat as if it was a living thing that could feel, and flung it to the other end of the room with an oath.
The time passed; and still, though his resolution to stand between Miss Gwilt and her marriage remained unbroken, he was as far as ever from discovering the means which might lead him to his end. The more he thought and thought of it, the darker and the darker his course in the future looked to him.
He rose again, as wearily as he had sat down, and went to his cupboard. "I'm feverish and thirsty," he said; "a cup of tea may help me." He opened his canister, and measured out his small allowance of tea, less carefully than usual. "Even my own hands won't serve me to-day!" he thought, as he scraped together the few grains of tea that he had spilled, and put them carefully back in the canister.
In that fine summer weather, the one fire in the house was the kitchen fire. He went downstairs for the boiling water, with his teapot in his hand.
Nobody but the landlady was in the kitchen. She was one of the many English matrons whose path through this world is a path of thorns; and who take a dismal pleasure, whenever the opportunity is afforded them, in inspecting the scratched and bleeding feet of other people in a like condition with themselves. Her one vice was of the lighter sort--the vice of curiosity; and among the many counterbalancing virtues she possessed was the virtue of greatly respecting Mr. Bashwood, as a lodger whose rent was regularly paid, and whose ways were always quiet and civil from one year's end to another.
"What did you please to want, sir?" asked the landlady. "Boiling water, is it? Did you ever know the water boil, Mr. Bashwood, when you wanted it? Did you ever see a sulkier fire than that?
I'll put a stick or two in, if you'll wait a little, and give me the chance. Dear, dear me, you'll excuse my mentioning it, sir, but how poorly you do look to-day!"The strain on Mr. Bashwood's mind was beginning to tell.
Something of the helplessness which he had shown at the station appeared again in his face and manner as he put his teapot on the kitchen table and sat down.
"I'm in trouble, ma'am," he said, quietly; "and I find trouble gets harder to bear than it used to be.""Ah, you may well say that!" groaned the landlady. "_I'm_ ready for the undertaker, Mr. Bashwood, when _my_ time comes, whatever you may be. You're too lonely, sir. When you're in trouble, it's some help--though not much--to shift a share of it off on another person's shoulders. If your good lady had only been alive now, sir, what a comfort you would have found her, wouldn't you?"A momentary spasm of pain passed across Mr. Bashwood's face. The landlady had ignorantly recalled him to the misfortunes of his married life. He had been long since forced to quiet her curiosity about his family affairs by telling her that he was a widower, and that his domestic circumstances had not been happy ones; but he had taken her no further into his confidence than this. The sad story which he had related to Midwinter, of his drunken wife who had ended her miserable life in a lunatic asylum, was a story which he had shrunk from confiding to the talkative woman, who would have confided it in her turn to every one else in the house.
"What I always say to my husband when he's low, sir," pursued the landlady, intent on the kettle, "is, 'What would you do _now,_Sam, without Me?' When his temper don't get the better of him (it will boil directly, Mr. Bashwood), he says, 'Elizabeth, Icould do nothing.' When his temper does get the better of him, he says, 'I should try the public-house, missus; and I'll try it now.' Ah, I've got _my_ troubles! A man with grown-up sons and daughters tippling in a public-house! I don't call to mind, Mr.
Bashwood, whether _you_ ever had any sons and daughters? And yet, now I think of it, I seem to fancy you said yes, you had.
Daughters, sir, weren't they? and, ah, dear! dear! to be sure!
all dead."
"I had one daughter, ma'am," said Mr. Bashwood, patiently--"only one, who died before she was a year old.""Only one!" repeated the sympathizing landlady. "It's as near boiling as it ever will be, sir; give me the tea-pot. Only one!