So he rode back to his Fee. The sights he had taken pleasure in a week ago because they had been the background for his vision of Celia were for the same cause hateful to him now. He looked in upon himself and shuddered at the ugliness he saw there. Because he was rejected by love he felt himself to be unlovable and loathsome, and he tried to hate the girl who had made him feel so; and did at moments hate her, with a murderous and lustful hatred, an impulse to ravish and destroy. This, he thought, proved him vile, and so justified the verdict he imputed to her; and he was alone with his vileness, an outcast from the family of mankind. That final gesture of hers, seeming to speak her disgust of his very person, had changed and unmanned him, filling him with an ugly and angry shame. Deep in his unconscious heart the child he had been ran in terror from a beloved face turned strange; but this memory lay beyond reach of his introspection and the poison worked the more shrewdly because it worked in secret. By the time he reached home he was drugged with his own gall, so that there seemed to be two of him: the man who smiled and was evasively polite with Brother Raphe, confessing to no greater disease than weariness and an aching head; and this other, this proud, tortured, and self-torturing Ishmael, this demon of hate and self-hate, this exile from life, who would never again, he vowed, allow it to be guessed that he had a heart like other men. In dreams that night, charmed by the sleek grace of her form and the shy beauty of her wondering eyes, he pursued a hind in the forest, and caught her, and coaxed her into friendship, and felt her body turn to writhing maggots under his touch. He woke sweating, and remembered Celia; but presently he found he had fallen into a deep well; his bare feet touched a slimy bottom; the water, creeping with cold life, came up to his armpits. It was dark and cold and silent, and he thought that he must stay there for ever, dreadfully immortal, and never again hear a human voice or feel the sun on his hands. The world above was infinitely remote, a mere mind-picture of something long lost or perhaps only imagined. He exhausted himself with sobbing and shouting, and the walls of the well gave back a hollow sound like madness, till at last that too failed him, and, though he seemed to be shouting still, the silence was absolute, a vast void. If only someone would let the bucket down for me, he thought; and with the thought came hope and a renewal of longing. In this expectation, with the sickness of despair often intervening, he lived many long years, years as many and as slow as the small slimy things that lived in the dank mud of the walls and were his only companions. At last, light from above blazed down on him, and in that shaft of radiance, partly obscuring it, the dark shape of the bucket slowly descended. And presently his feet were in the bucket, his hands were clinging to the rope, and he was being drawn up, up, into the world again, and could hear the rhythm and creak of the windlass—a ravishing music. And now, being within a yard of the top, and hearing a friend’s voice calling him by name, he became crazy with eagerness and joy, and thought himself already in heaven, until he saw a hand thrust over the well’s brink, and the hand held a knife, and the knife began gently, gently, sawing at the rope that supported him. He fell. The world of light became a distant star; dark water engulfed him; silence surged back into his ears. But with the terror of the fall he woke, to remember Celia and the face of her scorn. And to shut out that sight, which was so much more terrible than any nightmare, he tried to fight his way back into the country of dreams, and dozed, and woke, and dozed, and woke again. And now, at each waking, Celia came to him with love in her eyes; and he, knowing himself mocked, shuddered and shrank from her.
But in the morning the world had a different colour, so that he forgot the blackest of his resolutions and was betrayed into telling something of his story to Brother Raphe. ‘I have a mind,’ he ended bitterly,’ to marry poor Tisha Bailey, and let another man’s child inherit my patrimony.’
‘To what end?’ asked Brother Raphe mildly.
‘To no end,’ returned the young man,’ unless we account it the end of me and my hopes. Indeed the project pleases me. I have no other use for my name. Why should I not fling it as a cloak to this poor naked creature?’