Page:Arthur Machen - The Hill of Dreams.djvu/82

THE HILL OF DREAMS blustering winds of life, which a stronger man would have laughed at and enjoyed, were to him 'hail-storms and fire-showers.' After all, Messrs. Beit, the publishers, were only sharp men of business, and these terrible Dixons and Gervases and Colleys merely the ordinary limited clergy and gentry of a quiet country town; sturdier sense would have dismissed Dixon as an old humbug, Stanley Gervase, Esquire, J.P., as a 'bit of a bounder,' and the ladies as 'rather a shoddy lot.' But he was walking slowly now, in painful silence, his heavy, lagging feet striking against the loose stones. He was not thinking of the girl beside him; only something seemed to swell and grow and swell within his heart; it was all the torture of his days, weary hopes and weary disappointment, scorn rankling and throbbing, and the thought 'I had rather call the devils my brothers and live with them in hell.' He choked and gasped for breath, and felt involuntary muscles working in his face, and the impulses of a madman stirring him; he himself was in truth the realisation of the vision of Caermaen that night, a city with mouldering walls beset by the ghostly legion. Life and the world and the laws of the sunlight had passed away, and the 72