O young lord-lover, what sighs are those, For one that will never be thine?
—Tennyson, Maud (1855)
It was his immediate intention to send Sam with a message for the Irish doctor. He phrased it to himself as he walked— “Mrs. Tranter is deeply concerned” ... “If any expense should be incurred in forming a search party” ... or better, “If I can be of any assistance, financial or otherwise”—such sentences floated through his head. He called to the undeaf ostler as he entered the hotel to fetch Sam out of the taproom and send him upstairs. But he no sooner entered his sitting room when he received his third shock of that event-ful day.
A note lay on the round table. It was sealed with black wax. The writing was unfamiliar: Mr. Smithson, at the White Lion. He tore the folded sheet open. There was no heading, no signature.
I beg you to see me one last time. I will wait this afternoon and tomorrow morning. If you do not come, I shall never trouble you again.
Charles read the note twice, three times; then stared out at the dark air. He felt infuriated that she should so carelessly risk his reputation; relieved at this evidence that she was still alive; and outraged again at the threat implicit in that last sentence. Sam came into the room, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, an unsubtle hint that he had been interrupted at his supper. As his lunch had consisted of a bottle of ginger beer and three stale Abernethy biscuits, he may be forgiven. But he saw at a glance that his master was in no better a mood than he had been ever since leaving Winsyatt.
“Go down and find out who left me this note.”
“Yes, Mr. Charles.”
Sam left, but he had not gone six steps before Charles was at the door. “Ask whoever took it in to come up.”
“Yes, Mr. Charles.”
The master went back into his room; and there entered his mind a brief image of that ancient disaster he had found recorded in the blue lias and brought back to Ernestina—the ammonites caught in some recession of water, a micro-catastrophe of ninety million years ago. In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality—history, religion, duty, social posi-tion, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
He turned as Sam came through the door with the same ostler Charles had just spoken to. A boy had brought the note. At ten o’clock that morning. The ostler knew the boy’s face, but not his name. No, he had not said who the sender was. Charles impatiently dismissed him; and then as impa-tiently asked Sam what he found to stare at.
“Wasn’t starin’ at nuffin’, Mr. Charles.”
“Very well. Tell them to send me up some supper. Any-thing, anything.”
“Yes, Mr. Charles.”
“And I do not want to be disturbed again. You may lay out my things now.”
Sam went into the bedroom next to the sitting room, while Charles stood at the window. As he looked down, he saw in the light from the inn windows a small boy run up the far side of the street, then cross the cobbles below his own window and go out of sight. He nearly threw up the sash and called out, so sharp was his intuition that this was the messenger again. He stood in a fever of embarrassment. There was a long enough pause for him to begin to believe
that he was wrong. Sam appeared from the bedroom and made his way to the door out. But then there was a knock. Sam opened the door.
It was the ostler, with the idiot smile on his face of one who this time has made no mistake. In his hand was a note.
“’Twas the same boy, sir. I asked ‘un, sir. ‘E sez ‘twas the same woman as before, sir, but ‘e doan’ know ‘er name. Us all calls ‘er the—“
“Yes, yes. Give me the note.”
Sam took it and passed it to Charles, but with a certain dumb insolence, a dry knowingness beneath his mask of manservitude. He flicked his thumb at the ostler and gave h............