CHAPTER XXXI

After breakfast I screwed up my courage to the point of broaching the subject I had most on my mind. “There is something I want to say to you,” I began, and my father instantly adopted an attitude of motionless attention, so excessively attentive that it had the effect of putting me out, and I forgot the phrases I had prepared beforehand, and could only stammer awkwardly that it was my desire to leave the McAllisters and choose some lodging for myself.

A return to this question I saw was not pleasing to him, and I had hardly expected it to be so.

“You are very self-willed,” he said, slowly.

I knew from the tone in which this opinion was uttered that he had already made up his mind about my request, yet some obscure instinct of self-preservation still kept me from giving in. I don’t suppose I could have satisfactorily explained that instinct to my father, even had I become perfectly confidential, and certainly no such thought ever crossed my mind. The result was that he looked upon my wish as a mere caprice.

“It seems to me we have already fully discussed the question,” he remarked unsympathetically.

“I didn’t know then.... I mean I don’t like sleeping with George.”

“Why? You have your own bed, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“George is your cousin.”

“I know he is my cousin,” I answered wearily. “What difference does that make?” Already I felt the whole thing was hopeless.

“It is just this sort of nonsense which makes me object to your going to stay at Derryaghy,” my father began impatiently. “You are pampered with every luxury there, till you begin to dislike and look down upon everybody who hasn’t had your advantages.”

“I’m not thinking of advantages,” I muttered, with a sort of irony.

“I didn’t know when I arranged for you to stay with them that they would not be able to give you a room to yourself. On the other hand, I don’t see that it is at all a sufficient reason for your leaving now you are there. I told you so when I wrote to you. It is only an excuse to get your own way. You have always been like that; though I should have thought you would hardly have considered it worth while to bring the matter up again after all these months.”

I accepted my father’s decision without further protest. As a matter of fact, a kind of listlessness had come upon me, an apathetic indifference to whatever might happen.

It was Christmas Eve. A heavy fall of snow had occurred during the night, and on the hard, frozen ground it lay unmelted to the dark border of the sea. All the morning I spent beside the fire reading “Richard Feverel,” but about half-past three I went out for a walk over the golf-links. The snow was several inches deep, but being perfectly hard was not unpleasant for walking. I had slept badly last night, a sleep broken by wretched dreams, and I had a mind to go for a really long walk and tire myself out. In spite of being at home again, in spite of this beautiful, bright, exhilarating weather, in spite of the fact that I would be getting a Christmas-box from Mrs. Carroll to-morrow, and a letter from Katherine, and another from Owen, my spirits were of the gloomiest. Never before had I looked so closely into my own soul, and never before had I found so little there to comfort me. I knew that for months past my mind had been gradually submitted to a poisonous influence that had filtered through my blood, like a vapour from some fever-breeding marsh. Yet certain seeds, I thought, could perhaps only have taken root within me, could perhaps only so quickly have sprung to tall dark flower, because they had found a soil already apt to receive them: and I remembered my father’s suspicions in the past. I thought of a book I had been reading lately――a book written for boys, and all about boys――and I compared myself with its heroes. I compared the gloom that weighed upon me now with the troubles they had experienced, and it seemed to me I must be different, not in degree but in kind, from every boy in that book, from the bad just as much as from the good. I remembered hours, whole days, when I had been like them, like the decent ones I mean, for with the others I had nothing in common――I had never wanted to shirk games; and bullying, gambling, dishonesty, and “pubs,” had no attraction for me. But it was just because there were bits of the book in which I could see a part of myself that I was troubled by the absence of other parts, of so many other feelings that none of these boys shared. I wondered if I were quite abnormal, but how could I ever find out even that; for just as nobody knew what I was, I knew nothing really of anybody else, save what they cared to show me or took no trouble to hide. I was hopelessly shut in to the little circle of my own sensations, desires, and emotions. Owen, whom I knew better than any other boy,――what, after all, did I know of him? I knew no one but myself, and of myself I knew much that filled me with shame.

A deep silence overshadowed all things, the silence of the fallen snow. I had come to a stand-still. Around me was an infinite stretch of whiteness, almost unbroken, save where the sea was dark and restless under the whip of the rising wind. Dusk had crept up imperceptibly, and more light now rose from the ground than fell from the leaden sky overhead. Snow had again begun to fall. A few flakes turned and fluttered down out of the darkness, but I knew this was only the beginning. I walked to the edge of the black, desolate sea, and watched the waves rolling in to break at my feet, and at that moment I felt infinitely alone, and indeed for miles round there was probably no other human being. But it was as if I were alone in a dead world. The whirling flakes of snow fell ever faster out of the winter sky; the barren, frozen land was wrapped in a stillness that was more like the stillness of death than of sleep; the only sounds there were came from the waves breaking at my feet, and from an occasional sweep of wind forlorn as though no ears were there to listen. The creeping on of night seemed to be the shutting out for ever of all life, and one could imagine there would never be anything more, that the end had at last been reached.

And the thought of death came to me, without terror, came, rather, as a solution. All that bound me to existence seemed now attenuated to the thinnest cobweb. If I just lay down here and waited....

Tony, who had grown restless at my long delay, suddenly broke into my consciousness. He began to urge me to come on, with a peculiar, eager, discontented note in his voice. He jumped up with his large paws against me. I knelt in the snow and hugged him in my arms, while his warm red tongue passed rapidly over my face. I held him close, and his black nose was pressed into my cheek, and he wagged his tail and nibbled at my ears.