He sighed heavily; but he went away, down-stairs, and away for ever.
Only as he entered the parlour his eyes caught on two silhouettes,
one of himself, one of Sylvia, done in the first month of their
marriage, by some wandering artist, if so he could be called. They
were hanging against the wall in little oval wooden frames; black
profiles, with the lights done in gold; about as poor semblances of
humanity as could be conceived; but Philip went up, and after
looking for a minute or so at Sylvia's, he took it down, and
buttoned his waistcoat over it.
It was the only thing he took away from his home.
He went down the entry on to the quay. The river was there, and
waters, they say, have a luring power, and a weird promise of rest
in their perpetual monotony of sound. But many people were there, if
such a temptation presented itself to Philip's mind; the sight of
his fellow-townsmen, perhaps of his acquaintances, drove him up
another entry--the town is burrowed with such--back into the High
Street, which he straightway crossed into a well-known court, out of
which rough steps led to the summit of the hill, and on to the fells
and moors beyond.
He plunged and panted up this rough ascent. From the top he could
look down on the whole town lying below, severed by the bright
shining river into two parts. To the right lay the sea, shimmering
and heaving; there were the cluster of masts rising out of the
little port; the irregular roofs of the houses; which of them,
thought he, as he carried his eye along the quay-side to the
market-place, which of them was his? and he singled it out in its
unfamiliar aspect, and saw the thin blue smoke rising from the
kitchen chimney, where even now Phoebe was cooking the household
meal that he never more must share.
Up at that thought and away, he knew not nor cared not whither. He
went through the ploughed fields where the corn was newly springing;
he came down upon the vast sunny sea, and turned his back upon it
with loathing; he made his way inland to the high green pastures;
the short upland turf above which the larks hung poised 'at heaven's
gate'. He strode along, so straight and heedless of briar and bush,
that the wild black cattle ceased from grazing, and looked after him
with their great blank puzzled eyes.
He had passed all enclosures and stone fences now, and was fairly on
the desolate brown moors; through the withered last year's ling and
fern, through the prickly gorse, he tramped, crushing down the
tender shoots of this year's growth, and heedless of the startled
plover's cry, goaded by the furies. His only relief from thought,
from the remembrance of Sylvia's looks and words, was in violent
bodily action.