been used before to go out
riding with Rachel in the early morning, in order to be back by the time
Lady Gore was ready to begin her day. They had tacitly abandoned this
habit now. Then one day it occurred to Sir William that it might be a
good thing for Rachel to resume it. He proposed to her that they should
go out as they used. She, in her inmost heart shrinking from it, but
thinking it would be a satisfaction to him, agreed. He, shrinking from
it as much as she did, thought to please her. And so they went out and
rode silently side by side, overpowered by mute comparison of this day
with days that had been. And when they got home they went each their own
way, and made no attempt at exchanging words. Sir William went miserably
to his study, his heart aching with a rush of almost unbearable sorrow
as he thought of the bright little room upstairs to which he had been
wont to hurry for the welcome that always awaited him. What should he do
with his life? How should he fill it? he asked himself in a burst of
grief, as he shut himself in. And so much had the theory, firmly
believed in by himself and his wife, that he had by his own free will,
and in order to devote his life to her, abandoned any quest of a public
career become an absolute conviction in his mind, that he felt a dull
resentment at having been so noble. He recognised now that it had been
quixotic. He had let the time pass. Fifty-five! To be sure, in these
days it is not old age; it may, indeed, under certain circumstances be
the prime of life, for a man who has begun his career early, political
or otherwise. Had this been Sir William's lot he could have sought some
consolation, or at any rate alleviation, in his misfortune, by turning
at once to his work and plunging into it more strenuously than before.
But even that mitigation, for so much as it might be worth, was denied
to him. And he sat there, trying to face the fact that seemed almost
incredible to a man of what seemed to him his aptitudes and capacity,
the awful fact that he had not enough to do to fill up his life. He did
not state this pitiless truth to himself explicitly, but it was
beginning to loom from behind a veil, and he would some day be forced to
look at it. He could not start anything fresh. He had not the requisite
impulse. He could have continued, he could not begin; the theatre of his
actions, as Lady Gore had foreseen, had indeed fallen when she fell, and
without it he could initiate n