rooms he occupied at the most expensive hotel in Washington. The
April sun was just setting, and it flamed upon a huge mirror directly
opposite the luxurious chair in which he sat. He looked at his own
image reflected full length in the glass. It seemed to be moving, to
be surrounded by other figures. He saw them well—painted and bedizened
women, some of them loaded with jewels and with coronets on their
heads. Their faces were beautiful and engaging and made his pulses
leap, and then suddenly these faces changed into those of vultures with
bloody beaks and hungry eyes. Then there were men, some in court dress
and with orders sparkling on their breasts. All of them had a foreign
look, they spoke a language he only half understood; and they too
changed into hungry, distorted figures which he knew were the shapes
of vampires and harpies. They smiled upon him and fawned upon him, and
he saw himself smiling back, rather pleased, it appeared. Sometimes he
and this crowd were moving through splendid rooms; there were balls and
dinners going on, and he could hear the clash and rhythm of orchestras.
Again, they were in dismal business offices, or in raging crowds upon
Continental bourses. At first he was always surrounded, and it seemed
as if he were losing something all the time.
Gradually the men and women about him no longer fawned upon him. They
were familiar with him; then they jeered him; and presently they
menaced him. They tried to strangle him, to rob him, and he had lost
something—money or power or capacity, or perhaps all three, and he
could not defend himself. And they grew more and more foreign to him,
he could not understand their language at all. They talked among
themselves, and he did not know what they were saying. And after a
while he grew helpless, and did not know where he was; and then he
saw himself standing on a bridge at night, in a foreign city. There
were many lights upon the bridge, which were reflected in the black
and rushing river. He was about to throw himself into the river, when
it suddenly came to him that it was cold and he was thinly clad and
hungry. And then he knew that he was in a strange country, and it came
to him that he would return to his own land, to a place where there was
warmth and comfort and the strange thing he had lost would be awaiting
him. But then he heard wolfish voices shrieking at him out of the
darkness that he had no home, no country—that he would never again be
warmed and fed, and invisible hands like lions’ claws were clutching
him and thrusting him into the dark waters, and he could only feebly
resist them. There was a great mocking, reddish moon in the wild night
sky and it reeled about and fell into an abyss of black clouds and then
dropped into the blacker river. And the stars were going out one by
one, so that the heavens and the earth had a blackness of the blackest
night.
This produced a kind of horror in him, which made him cry out—a loud
cry, he thought it. But it was really low and half smothered. And
to his amazement he was not in his room at the hotel, but standing
in the doorway of his own house. It was night, and he heard a great
clock inside his own house strike the hour—nine o’clock. He could not
remember how or why he had got from his hotel to his deserted house.
He saw the caretaker, an old hobgoblin of a negro, peer at him from a
basement window, and he shrank behind the great stone pillars of the
doorway. It was a warm, soft spring night, without a moon, but the
purple floor of heaven glittered with palpitating stars. The street
was always a quiet one; to–night it was so strangely still that he
feared to move lest his footfall should sound too loud. And while he
stood, dazed and hesitating within his doorway, he saw two figures
come together down the street and stop at Elizabeth’s house. One was
Elizabeth, the other was the man she loved. The night was so warm
that the house door was left open. Clavering watched the two figures
mount the steps and go into the house. The man touched Elizabeth’s
arm in helping her up the steps. It was a simple, conventional thing,
but Clavering saw revealed in it a love so deep, so constant, so
passionately tender, that he thought he had never seen real love
before. He turned away, to enter upon the fate that had been laid bare
to him.
THE END
THE SEA–WOLF
By JACK LONDON
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With Illustrations by W. J. Aylward
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WHOSOEVER SHALL OFFEND
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_THE STORY OF A FORGOTTEN HERO_
By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS, D.D.
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DESPOTISM AND DEMOCRACY
_A Study in Washington Society and Politics_
By FOXCROFT DAVIS
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A Story of the Time of Alexander the Great
By ROBERT H. FULLER
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THE MASTER–WORD
A Story of the South To–day
By L. H. HAMMOND
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BEYOND CHANCE OF CHANGE
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_Author of “The Day before Yesterday,” etc._
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THE LETTERS OF THEODORA
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
—A Table of Contents was not in the original work; one has been
produced and added by Transcriber.