CHAPTER XVII

During that last week of August, after the Dales had left, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Up to the eve of their departure I had been happier than I had ever been in my life, but as soon as they were gone I became a prey to sentimental regret. If Katherine had cared for me as I cared for her I might have found more comfort; but she didn’t, and I was perfectly aware of the fact. Mingled with it all was an increasing dread of the new existence I already saw opening out before me. I distrusted it: I had, indeed, that instinctive distrust of life itself, which contemplates anything unknown with uneasiness, and clings with passion to familiar faces and things.

When the day of my departure, a Saturday, came round, and I saw my box all corded and ready in the hall, I felt extremely depressed. Now that I had said good-bye to Mrs. Carroll it was as if I had cut myself completely adrift from the past, and yet I believe I should have been willing to go had I not been going to the McAllisters. The McAllisters were our relations; the only ones I knew of. Aunt Margaret was my father’s sister, and her husband kept a shop in a street called Cromac Street. I had never been to their house, but they had been down a good many times to visit us, and I did not care for them. There were four children, and I disliked them all, except George, the eldest; and I disliked Aunt Margaret in particular; while to Uncle George I was indifferent, seeing that he did not very much count one way or the other. But to live with them!...

Mrs. Carroll had wanted to send me to a school in England, but my father would not permit this. He had an idea, and nothing would ever shake it, that English public schools were dens of iniquity. This he had gathered from some article that had appeared in a review, and from the story “Eric.” I suppose he thought I should fall a particularly easy victim to the temptations I might be submitted to; take, like the boys in “Eric,” to drink, “little by little,” or even quite rapidly; come home disgraced; at any rate he would not run the risk, when, by sending me to the McAllisters, he could provide me with the “influence of a religious home.” For Uncle George was religious, and so was Aunt Margaret; and so, I supposed, were the children――George, at least, I had been told, was a communicant――and it was the thought of all this that now lay heavy on my soul.

I was not to go up to town till the afternoon, and as we sat down to our early dinner I could not, though I knew it was absolutely useless, refrain from again taking up the tabooed subject. I suggested how much better it would be for me to go into lodgings of my own choosing. If they were more expensive, Mrs. Carroll would not mind. “Whether she would mind or not,” my father answered, “I should have thought you would not have wanted to put her to any unnecessary expense.”

“But she wouldn’t mind doing it,” I repeated, obstinately. “She told you she wanted to.”

“You know very well that is not the question,” my father said, more coldly. “I have explained why I think it better that you should be with those who will look after you. You are not old enough to be by yourself.”

“I don’t like the McAllisters,” I answered, sullenly.

My father looked annoyed. “Perhaps you think they are not good enough for you?”

“They certainly aren’t,” I replied.

It was a pity that our last meal together should have been somewhat embittered by these remarks, but it was not altogether my fault. For my father had been too extreme in his measures. Under the impression that what I needed was to get into surroundings which would more or less counteract the supposed relaxing influence of Mrs. Carroll’s indulgence, he had arranged that I was not even to come home for weekends, but was to submit myself during the entire term to the bracing effect of the McAllister family.

No more was said upon the subject, and my father gave me after dinner a little book, called “Daily Light,” which I promised to read every night and morning. He came to the station to see me off, and, as we were far too early, he was obliged to stand for a quarter of an hour at the window of the carriage, while I longed for the train to start, and we both tried hard to find something to say. I was tormented by an uncertainty as to whether he would expect me to kiss him when I said good-bye. At the sound of the guard’s whistle I thrust out my hand. We shook hands; that was all; and, with the train beginning to move out of the station, I sat back in the corner of the empty third-class carriage.

I had a sense of leaving everything behind me, as if I had been starting for the world’s end; and, curiously enough, as much as, or more than, by any human face, I was haunted by a vision of the house. I had forsaken it, and I felt its low, faint call coming to me through the rain. I could see the silent, closed rooms upstairs, the long passage with its rows of brown portraits and the tall window at the end, and it was as if a dust were dropping down upon these things, covering them to sleep till I should return. The shadowy ghosts slipped back into their picture-frames; gradually the life died out of their eyes; and a cold, unbroken silence, like the chill of death, closed over all that hidden under-world. Outside the apples had begun to redden on the high brick walls of the fruit-garden, but within the house all was frozen and lifeless. They were my spirits, my ghosts, and could live only while I loved them. I loved them still, but I was too far away, and I might not find them when I came back.

The landscape gliding past me showed through a fine, grayish mist. It was cold, and I pulled up the windows, which almost immediately became covered with the same mist that drifted in the air outside. I wondered where Katherine was, and what she was doing. I had not heard from her, though I had written twice. Then I lay back in my uncomfortable corner and tried to think of nothing.