Chance

"I am not coming with you," he was saying. "I'll tell the man . . . I

can't. Better not. What is it? Are you cold? Come! What is it? Only

to go to a confounded stuffy room, a hole of an office. Not a quarter of

an hour. I'll come for you--in ten days. Don't think of it too much.

Think of no man, woman or child of all that silly crowd cumbering the

ground. Don't think of me either. Think of yourself. Ha! Nothing will

be able to touch you then--at last. Say nothing. Don't move. I'll have

everything arranged; and as long as you don't hate the sight of me--and

you don't--there's nothing to be frightened about. One of their silly

offices with a couple of ink-slingers of no consequence; poor, scribbling

devils."

The hansom drove away with Flora de Barral inside, without movement,

without thought, only too glad to rest, to be alone and still moving away

without effort, in solitude and silence.

Anthony roamed the streets for hours without being able to remember in

the evening where he had been--in the manner of a happy and exulting

lover. But nobody could have thought so from his face, which bore no

signs of blissful anticipation. Exulting indeed he was but it was a

special sort of exultation which seemed to take him by the throat like an

enemy.

Anthony's last words to Flora referred to the registry office where they

were married ten days later. During that time Anthony saw no one or

anything, though he went about restlessly, here and there, amongst men

and things. This special state is peculiar to common lovers, who are

known to have no eyes for anything except for the contemplation, actual

or inward, of one human form which for them contains the soul of the

whole world in all its beauty, perfection, variety and infinity. It must

be extremely pleasant. But felicity was denied to Roderick Anthony's

contemplation. He was not a common sort of lover; and he was punished

for it as if Nature (which it is said abhors a vacuum) were so very

conventional as to abhor every sort of exceptional conduct. Roderick

Anthony had begun already to suffer. That is why perhaps he was so

industrious in going about amongst his fellowmen who would have been

surprised and humiliated, had they known how little solidity and even

existence they had in his eyes. But they could not suspect anything so

queer. They saw nothing extraordinary in him during that fortnight. The

proof of this is that they were willing to transact business with him.

Obviously they were; since it is then that the offer of chartering his

ship for the special purpose of proceeding to the Western Islands was put

in his way by a firm of shipbrokers who had no doubt of his sanity.