The house was very quiet, and suddenly he remembered that the servants were out, witnessing the fireworks which Sir Richard had provided in the park of Greengates for the entertainment of the village on the eve of his daughter's wedding.
They had asked permission to go, and he had granted it readily enough; and now he was grateful for the peace and tranquillity which their absence engendered in the dark and quiet house.
Dimmer and more gloomy grew the room in which he sat--his consulting-room, chosen to-night for its long window open to the garden without. More and more thickly clustered the shadows round him as he sat half-sunk in a corner of the big leather couch. Once an owl hooted in the tall trees outside the house, and the strange, melancholy note seemed a fit accompaniment to the eerie stillness of the night.
Worse and ever more hard to bear grew the fierce throbbing in his head and eyes, but his wretchedness of mind ran a good race with his bodily suffering; and had he been asked, suddenly, the nature of the pain which tormented him he would have found it hard to answer immediately.
Only as the quiet hours wore on he began to feel that the limit of his endurance was almost reached. He told himself that even Iris herself would not willingly sanction such suffering as his had now become. In all the world he desired only one boon--oblivion, unconsciousness, rest from this state of being which was surely unendurable; and as a more exquisitely painful throb of anguish shot through his head he plunged his hand into his breast-pocket in search of a certain little case which was generally to be found there during his day's round.
But he remembered, with a sudden keen disappointment, that he had changed his coat on returning home to dinner, and the means of alleviation which he sought were not at hand.
He half rose, intending to go in search of the thing he wanted; but the effort of moving was too much, and he sank back again with an irritable groan and prepared to endure still more of this misery.
Next he thought he would try the effect of a cigarette, but the matches were not on the table before him. That obstacle, however, need not be insurmountable, for in a drawer at his elbow he kept a supply, and moving cautiously, for every movement set his nerves jangling, he turned on the couch and opened the drawer to seek the matches which should be there.
He found them immediately, and was in the act of taking one from the box when his eye fell on a small package which somehow roused a strange feeling of interest in his pain-shrouded mind.