CHAPTER XXXI
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Sunday morning opened out scowlingly, with an angry watery look that saw no pleasure in anything. There was no rain, but there were great black clouds heaped up in the sky, every one containing a thunderstorm, if not a couple. Such clouds they were as you can make for yourselves by dipping a thumb in ink and smearing circularly over paper. Between the superimposed piles of them at times, as they rifted, the cold grey light poured down upon the level landscape below like pailfuls of water. The chill drops still spangled everywhere from the recent rain. Every bird that flew out of the hedges scattered diamonds in its passage. The grass was bowed down beneath its watery burden, drop upon drop was strung on the bended blades. The trailing porch of flowering tea hung weightily over the door, ready to discharge its accumulated wetness down any neck that passed under. On all the window-sills were long, tremulous watery rows of jewels. The whitewashed walls of the house were soaked and mottled; everywhere about the path and laneways were great pools of gathered water, shivering under the breath that blew over them now and again, in apprehension of more.
A very day, indeed, for hot coffee, odorous ham, and smoking mushrooms--as all these ministrants to the stomach's comfort on the Spawer's breakfast-table there are--but the Spawer only looks at them in staring disregard.
This last blow about Pam has struck him so suddenly and so forcefully that he can only keep feeling himself over, and wonder what bones are broken, and how many. His pride, he knows, has suffered a nasty shock. All along he has been reckoning upon the girl as though she were an actual possession, to be left or taken at his own sweet will; a fixed star in the firmament. And lo! now he finds she is very much of a planet, with a path of her own, that has swum into his ken and swum out again, leaving the astronomer stuck in the mud with his telescope to his eye, a pitiable object of miscalculation.
And by turns he is incredulous and despairing, and hopeful and indignant and irate. She is not going to be married. It is a lie. There is no truth in it. She is going to be married. The shadow-man, the moonlight, the parting, her avoidance of him--all point to the truth of it.
Pam was marrying a pair of bell-bottomed trousers and a shabby morning coat. Horrible! horrible!
Oh, the sting was bitter! The disappointment supreme. Even his love for the girl was so steeped in the sense of humiliation and of grief that she should have fallen to such extent below the standard of his measurement, that at times almost he failed to tell whether he really loved her any longer, or was possessed only of pity.
He could n't believe it. On his soul, he could n't believe it. He knew it was true, but he could n't believe it. On Sunday morning, wet or fine, he must go to Ullbrig and learn the truth. Father Mostyn would be sure to know and tell him.
And meanwhile he had to garb himself with the extra scrupulousness of attire for covering his torn pride. Now that he was humbled he must be very proud. He must show no tell-tale flinchings. He must laugh with the lazy, half-contemptuous humor, as though this little rustic world ... Morbleu! ... this little pasture of bucolic clods ... this fallow field of earthen intelligences ... you understand? ... this pitiable place called Ullbrig, meant no more to him in serious reality than Jarge Yenery's straw hat. If this thing were so, as he knew and dared not believe ... it should be buried in his bosom and heaped under a thousand simulations of indifference. Neither the girl nor any in Ullbrig should have the gratification of knowing that he had ever acted to her as other than the friend.
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