Of my wanderings after I left the Museum on that black and dismal dies
irae, I have but a dim recollection. But I must have traveled a quite
considerable distance, since it wanted an hour or two to the time for
returning to the surgery, and I spent the interval walking swiftly
through streets and squares, unmindful of the happenings around, intent
only on my present misfortune, and driven by a natural impulse to seek
relief in bodily exertion. For mental distress sets up, as it were, a
sort of induced current of physical unrest; a beneficent arrangement,
by which a dangerous excess of emotional excitement may be transformed
into motor energy, and so safely got rid of. The motor apparatus acts
as a safety-valve to the psychical; and if the engine races for a
while, with the onset of a bodily fatigue the emotional pressure-gauge
returns to a normal reading.
And so it was with me. At first I was conscious of nothing but a sense
of utter bereavement, of the shipwreck of all my hopes. But, by
degrees, as I threaded my way among the moving crowds, I came to a
better and more worthy frame of mind. After all, I had lost nothing
that I had ever had. Ruth was still all that she had ever been to
me—perhaps even more; and if that had been a rich endowment yesterday,
why not to-day also? And how unfair it would be to her if I should
mope and grieve over a disappointment that was no fault of hers and for
which there was no remedy? Thus I reasoned with myself, and to such
purpose that, by the time I reached Fetter Lane, my dejection had come
to quite manageable proportions and I had formed the resolution to get
back to the status quo ante bellum as soon as possible.
About eight o'clock, as I was sitting alone in the consulting-room,
gloomily persuading myself that I was now quite resigned to the
inevitable, Adolphus brought me a registered packet, at the handwriting
on which my heart gave such a bound that I had much ado to sign the
receipt. As soon as Adolphus had retired (with undissembled contempt
of the shaky signature) I tore open the packet, and as I drew out a
letter a tiny box dropped on the table.
The letter was all too short, and I devoured it over and over again
with the eagerness of a condemned man reading a reprieve: