Accepting what Reardon had bequeathed to him, he removed the books and furniture to a room in that part of the town which he had found most convenient for his singular tutorial pursuits. The winter did not pass without days of all but starvation, but in March he received his fifteen pounds for ‘Mr Bailey,’ and this was a fortune, putting him beyond the reach of hunger for full six months. Not long after that he yielded to a temptation that haunted him day and night, and went to call upon Amy, who was still living with her mother at Westbourne Park. When he entered the drawing-room Amy was sitting there alone; she rose with an exclamation of frank pleasure.
‘I have often thought of you lately, Mr Biffen. How kind to come and see me!’
He could scarcely speak; her beauty, as she stood before him in the graceful black dress, was anguish to his excited nerves, and her voice was so cruel in its conventional warmth. When he looked at her eyes, he remembered how their brightness had been dimmed with tears, and the sorrow he had shared with her seemed to make him more than an ordinary friend. When he told her of his success with the publishers, she was delighted.
‘Oh, when is it to come out? I shall watch the advertisements so anxiously.’
‘Will you allow me to send you a copy, Mrs Reardon?’
‘Can you really spare one?’
Of the half-dozen he would receive, he scarcely knew how to dispose of three. And Amy expressed her gratitude in the most charming way. She had gained much in point of manner during the past twelve months; her ten thousand pounds inspired her with the confidence necessary to a perfect demeanour. That slight hardness which was wont to be perceptible in her tone had altogether passed away; she seemed to be cultivating flexibility of voice.
Mrs Yule came in, and was all graciousness. Then two callers presented themselves. Biffen’s pleasure was at an end as soon as he had to adapt himself to polite dialogue; he escaped as speedily as possible.
He was not the kind of man that deceives himself as to his own aspect in the eyes of others. Be as kind as she might, Amy could not set him strutting Malvolio-wise; she viewed him as a poor devil who often had to pawn his coat—a man of parts who would never get on in the world—a friend to be thought of kindly because her dead husband had valued him. Nothing more than that; he understood perfectly the limits of her feeling. But this could not put restraint upon the emotion with which he received any most trifling utterance of kindness from her. He did not think of what was, but of what, under changed circumstances, might be. To encourage such fantasy was the idlest self-torment, but he had gone too far in this form of indulgence. He became the slave of his inflamed imagination.
In that letter with which he replied to her praises of his book, perchance he had allowed himself to speak too much as he thought.
He wrote in reckless delight, and did not wait for the prudence of a later hour. When it was past recall, he would gladly have softened many of the expressions the letter contained. ‘I value it more than the praises of all the reviewers in existence’— would Amy be offended at that? ‘Yours in gratitude and reverence,’ he had signed himself—the kind of phrase that comes naturally to a passionate man, when he would fain say more than he dares. To what purpose this half-revelation? Unless, indeed, he wished to learn once and for ever, by the gentlest of repulses, that his homage was only welcome so long as it kept well within conventional terms.
He passed a month of distracted idleness, until there came a day when the need to see Amy was so imperative that it mastered every consideration. He donned his best clothes, and about four o’clock presented himself at Mrs Yule’s house. By ill luck there happened to be at least half a dozen callers in the drawing-room; the strappado would have been preferable, in his eyes, to such an ordeal as this. Moreover, he was convinced that both Amy and her mother received him with far less cordiality than on the last occasion. He had expected it, but he bit his lips till the blood came. What business had he among people of this kind? No doubt the visitors wondered at his comparative shabbiness, and asked themselves how he ventured to make a call without the regulation chimney-pot hat. It was a wretched and foolish mistake.
Ten minutes saw him in the street again, vowing that he would never approach Amy more. Not that he found fault with her; the blame was entirely his own.
He lived on the third floor of a house in Goodge Street, above a baker’s shop. The bequest of Reardon’s furniture was a great advantage to him, as he had only to pay rent for a bare room; the books, too, came as a godsend, since the destruction of his own. He had now only one pupil, and was not exerting himself to find others; his old energy had forsaken him.
For the failure of his book he cared nothing. It was no more than he anticipated. The work was done—the best he was capable of— and this satisfied him.
It was doubtful whether he loved Amy, in the true sense of exclusive desire. She represented for him all that is lovely in womanhood; to his starved soul and senses she was woman, the complement of his frustrate being. Circumstance had made her the means of exciting in him that natural force which had hitherto either been dormant or had yielded to the resolute will.
Companionless, inert, he suffered the tortures which are so ludicrous and contemptible to the happily married. Life was barren to him, and would soon grow hateful; only in sleep could he cast off the unchanging thoughts and desires which made all else meaningless. And rightly meaningless: he revolted against the unnatural constraints forbidding him to complete his manhood.
By what fatality was he alone of men withheld from the winning of a woman’s love?
He could not bear to walk the streets where the faces of beautiful women would encounter him. When he must needs leave the house, he went about in the poor, narrow ways, where only spectacles of coarseness, and want, and toil would be presented to him. Yet even here he was too often reminded that the poverty-stricken of the class to which poverty is natural were not condemned to endure in solitude. Only he who belonged to no class, who was rejected alike by his fellows in privation and by his equals in intellect, must die without having known the touch of a loving woman’s hand.
The summer went by, and he was unconscious of its warmth and light. How his days passed he could not have said.
One evening in early autumn, as he stood before the book-stall at the end of Goodge Street, a familiar voice accosted him. It was Whelpdale’s. A month or two ago he had stubbornly refused an invitation to dine with Whelpdale and other acquaintances—you remember what the occasion was—and since then the prosperous young man had not crossed his path.
‘I’ve something to tell you,’ said the assailer, taking hold of his arm. ‘I’m in a tremendous state of mind, and want someone to share my delight. You can walk a short way, I hope? Not too busy with some new book?’
Biffen gave no answer, but went whither he was led.
