THE TWO PASSIONS

The foggy February night refreshed his head, and the business of fetching the luggage from the hotel—­a commission that necessitated the delivery of his card and some very commanding language—­kept his mind in order.  Subsequently he drove to his cousin Baskelett’s Club, where he left a short note to say the house was engaged for the night and perhaps a week further.  Concise, but sufficient:  and he stated a hope to his cousin that he would not be inconvenienced.  This was courteous.

He had taken a bed at Renee’s hotel, after wresting her boxes from the vanquished hotel proprietor, and lay there, hearing the clear sound of every little sentence of hers during the absence of Rosamund:  her ‘Adieu,’ and the strange ‘Do you think so?’ and ’I know where I am; I scarcely know more.’  Her eyes and their darker lashes, and the fitful little sensitive dimples of a smile without joy, came with her voice, but hardened to an aspect unlike her.  Not a word could he recover of what she had spoken before Rosamund’s intervention.  He fancied she must have related details of her journey.  Especially there must have been mention, he thought, of her drive to the station from Tourdestelle; and this flashed on him the scene of his ride to the chateau, and the meeting her on the road, and the white light on the branching river, and all that was Renee in the spirit of the place she had abandoned for him, believing in him.  She had proved that she believed in him.  What in the name of sanity had been the meaning of his language? and what was it between them that arrested him and caused him to mumble absurdly of ‘doing best,’ when in fact he was her bondman, rejoiced to be so, by his pledged word? and when she, for some reason that he was sure she had stated, though he could recollect no more than the formless hideousness of it, was debarred from returning to Tourdestelle?

He tossed in his bed as over a furnace, in the extremity of perplexity of one accustomed to think himself ever demonstrably in the right, and now with his whole nature in insurrection against that legitimate claim.  It led him to accuse her of a want of passionate warmth, in her not having supplicated and upbraided him—­not behaving theatrically, in fine, as the ranting pen has made us expect of emergent ladies that they will naturally do.  Concerning himself, he thought commendingly, a tear would have overcome him.  She had not wept.  The kaleidoscope was shaken in his fragmentary mind, and she appeared thrice adorable for this noble composure, he brutish.

Conscience and reason had resolved to a dead weight in him, like an inanimate force, governing his acts despite the man, while he was with Renee.  Now his wishes and waverings conjured up a semblance of a conscience and much reason to assure him that he had done foolishly as well as unkindly, most unkindly:  that he was even the ghastly spectacle of a creature attempting to be more than he can be.  Are we never to embrace our inclinations?  Are the laws regulating an old dry man like his teacher and guide to be the same for the young and vigorous?