CHAPTER XXVIII

At Lady Day, when the negotiations for the sale of his unprofitable riverside domain were finally concluded, Rainham scarcely regretted to find that an ample margin had been left before the new company took possession; and he had still several months, during which he might remain in occupation of his old habitation, and arrange leisurely for the subsequent disposition of his books and more intimate personal chattels.  The dilapidated old house was to be pulled down by the new owners (the plans for an extensive warehouse, to be erected on the site of it, were already in the hands of the builders), and this also was a fact from which Rainham derived a certain satisfaction.

Insensibly, the spot had discovered a charm for him:  the few rooms, which had been his for so long, although, actually, so small a proportion of his days had been spent in them, had gradually taken the impress of his personality—­the faded carpets, the familiar grouping of pictures and books, the very shape of the apartment, and the discoloured paper on the walls, expressed him in a way that certainly no other abiding place, which might conceivably await him, could ever do.  And he took a dreary pleasure in the consideration that, after he had gone, the rooms would know no other occupant; that from the glazed and barred windows of the dreary building, which was to take the place of the quaint old house, when it was levelled to the ground, no person would ever gaze out, exactly as he had done, at the white and melancholy river; in which, as he said to himself fantastically, he had cast, one by one, as the days lengthened, his interests, his passions, his desires.

Years before, by an accident of inheritance, he had come into the property with an immense antipathy:—­a white elephant that would bring him neither profit nor honour, but which the modest competence that he had previously enjoyed did not allow him to refuse.  It had altered the tenor of his existence, destroyed his youth and his ambitions, and represented for many years, more completely than anything else, the element of failure which had run through his life.

And, after all, now that deliverance was at hand, he was by no means jubilant.  In escaping from this thraldom of so many years, he felt something of the chagrin with which a man witnesses the removal of some long-cherished and inveterate grievance; the more so, in that he could now remind himself impartially how small it had been, how little, after all, he had allowed it to weigh upon him.  In effect, had he not always done very much as he liked, lived half his time abroad in his preferred places, chosen his own friends, and followed his own tastes without greatly considering his inherited occupation?  He must look deeper than that, he reflected, within himself, or into the nature of things themselves, actually to seize and define that curious flaw which had made life seem to him at last (from what wearied psychologist, read long ago and half forgotten, did he cull the phrase?) “a long disease of the spirit.”