Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/165

Rh that game or, lying along the grass, talked as we ate sugared compounds or the satisfying parkin. Even the school is changed. The brass-plate is gone from the gate. The house is freshly painted and enlarged, but empty. I see the top of the cherry-tree over the wall.

I turned from it and went down the little lane, passing many remembered spots and things, and down the hill and to the small boat pier. And as I stood I began to think of my future. There was something of Capua in my present case: not so much bodily, as spiritual, Capua, and yet I knew quite well that at the best it was not in either case a campaigning ground. It was time I took some steps towards the great object of supporting myself. Time? more than time! Why had I not thought of it before? This money of Brooke's—it was not mine. I had said that I would not take it: I had said that I could not devote myself to the Cause. Oh Jupiter and the other immortals, I should think not! And yet, why such a decided not? Supposing I did devote myself? Well? No, it would not do. I don't care about it. No: I won't do that. No! I couldn't take and keep the money God knows it's a poor earth enough, this earth; and where is belief in fire and brimstone being my reward for doing this—or any thing? But that's nothing. There is the tribunal of my soul—that ideal of myself, by which I measure the actual of myself, and do not care to find too great a difference between them.

'And yet,' I thought, standing up at the bow of the boat and looking across the river, 'I could wish that I was sleeping the sleep of death, under the earth—at rest!'

 

I awoke on Monday morning it was into a state of dreaminess, the shadowy realm that is between the night's dreams and the day's. Rayne moved in it, with Claire, and myself; but all so dim and bodiless that they could not be called by names whose counterparts were realities. They were not of the night's