The Paris-Lyons express was speeding through the darkness. It was
intensely cold. The two other occupants of the carriage were shiveringly
asleep beneath their rugs. But Goddard was awake, tinglingly awake, yet
unconscious of external things.
He was passing through one of those rare epochs in life when a man
feels himself to be master of his fate. Ever since he had seen the Dover
Cliffs fading out of sight, and with them the last troubling impressions
of a late graveside, he had been strung with a sense of invincibility.
Nothing in his life that he had ardently desired had not been
accomplished. He had but to will a thing, and it was done. He had
conquered his position, step by step, with never a failure--his
reputation as a popular leader, his responsible position in the
Progressive League, his seat on the London County Council, his standing
as an economic writer, his prestige at Ecclesby, and now his seat in
Parliament. He had been returned by a triumphant majority. The victory
intoxicated him--that and the elation of freedom. In his exalted mood he
saw himself lifted above the moral conventions of men. The death of
his wife seemed a part of his destiny of victory. He had scarcely been
responsible. Blind fate had helped him, as it had done hitherto.
And now he was on his way to the most glorious conquest of all. Every
moment was bringing him nearer. To-morrow he would see Lady Phayre. His
arms would be about her. She would yield herself to him. The new life
would begin--great, glorious, wonderful. With her by his side there
would be nothing impossible. The whole world should bless his name.
He would make history. He would go down to posterity as the Great
Demagogue.
She would put her white arms about his neck, and her lips would cling to
his. When the thought came, a flash of passion irradiated the whole man.
He never doubted that he would win her. She loved him. The letter which
he had read over a thousand times was overwhelming evidence. Her hurried
flight from London also testified to the seriousness of the blow the
discovery had been to her. He conjured up scenes and incidents in their
past intercourse whose significance, unnoticed at the time, became
sweetly plain in the light of his new knowledge. Nothing could stand
in his way now. He was going to her, not a broken man humiliated with
failure, as he had done on the last occasion he had sought her, but
proud with name and fame, and the promise of great power in the land.
He had not written to her. His imagination was too much fired with the
idea he had conceived of bursting upon her suddenly with the news of his
freedom and with a passionate appeal. The vividness and excitement of
the past few days had awakened the theatrical element in his nature--the
dramatic instinct that lies in the nature of any great orator and leader
of men.
“_Lyons, dix minutes d’arrêt!_”
Goddard left the compartment to stretch his legs. The great station
loomed vast in the darkness of the mid-January morning. The tapping of
the wheels echoed ghostly in the stillness. Only a few muffled forms
had braved the cold, and were stamping their feet on the platform, or
hurrying to the dimly lit buffet for the morning coffee. Nothing more
delicious than this in the sweet spring dawn, but at five o’clock
in mid-winter it requires an effort to leave the snugness of the
compartment. To Goddard the journey was half dream, half delight. The
great train, standing, to his English eyes, monstrously high above the
rails, seemed some strange engine appointed by fate to his service. It
seemed symbolic of the irresistible force that he had at his command.
When the train started again he tried to sleep, but his brain was
too excited. He had not slept for three nights. Yet the feelings of
prostration that had come upon him just before Lizzie’s death had passed
away, giving place to one of intense vitality. Every fibre in his body
was alive. Sleep was scarcely necessary. Only a shooting pain now and
then in his head made him start and pass his hand impatiently across
his forehead. The train thundered on through the darkness, and Goddard
remained awake, possessed by the passionate intensity of his fixed idea.
He watched the day dawn, bright and glorious. At Avignon the world was
bathed in sunshine. It was an omen of happiness. At Marseilles it was
hot. All along that beautiful coast Goddard’s heart glowed within him.
The deep-coloured sea, the flowers, the light, the joyousness of the
south filled his senses with the wonder of a new world. His silent
companions got out at Toulon, and three swarthy Gascons took their
place, and talked with rich deep voices and extravagant gestures
until they reached Camoules, their destination. Goddard missed their
whole-hearted laughter when they had gone.
The day wore on. Cannes at four o’clock. In a few moments he would be in
Nice. He drew once more the letter from his pocket, rested his eyes
on the few words a long, long time. “Whatsoever your heart
desireth--Rhodanthe.” He looked out at the deep blue water meeting
the violet sky. Rhodanthe! The name was strangely in harmony with this
exotic beauty. Before the night was over he would call her by it. She
would be his. Together they would conquer the world.
He stepped on to the platform at Nice like a king coming to take
possession of a new realm. He looked around, as if he should see Lady
Phayre awaiting him, and then smiled at the fancy. The hotel porter
took his luggage to the Hôtel Terminus, the nearest. He was feverishly
anxious to set out on his quest of her without loss of time. A quarter
of an hour sufficed him to wash and make himself presentable, and then
he went out into the Avenue de la Gare. At another time he would have
loved to walk down the beautiful boulevard, bright with shops and cafés
and gaily coloured kiosques; but now the supreme hour of his life had
come, and the great thoroughfare became blurred as in a dream. He hailed
a cab, gave the address “Hôtel des Anglais” to the driver, and sat bolt
upright all the way, in an agony of impatience. He had no eyes now for
the sea as he emerged on to the Promenade des Anglais; but he scanned
the long line of palace-hotels, wondering which was Lady Phayre’s. The
cab stopped by the public gardens. Goddard looked up. It was the Hôtel
des Anglais. He threw a piece of money to the cabman, and entered.
The frock-coated, brass-buttoned porter approached him in polite
inquiry.
“I want to see Lady Phayre,” said Goddard.
“I am afraid, sir,” replied the man, “that Lady Phayre has gone away
this very morning.”
“Gone away?” asked Goddard, looking at him blankly. “Where to?”
“Ah, that I cannot say,” said the porter.
And then he added, with the benevolent smile of his class--
“Perhaps you have not heard, sir, that there is no longer such a person
as Lady Phayre.”
“What?” cried Goddard. “What do you mean?”
“Only that Madame was married this morning. It was to a Monsieur Gleam.
I believe he is a member of Parliament. He has been staying in the
hotel.”
Goddard stared at him with a ghastly face. He turned slowly and went
down the hotel steps. He staggered a few yards. Then the sea, and
the trees, and the great white palaces mingled together in a whirling
circle, and disappeared in the blackness of night. Something in his
brain seemed to snap, and he fell an inert mass on the pavement.
*****
For weeks he lay ill. He recovered to wish that he had died. Despair
overwhelmed him. His crime haunted him waking and sleeping. In his
bodily prostration he seemed to hear the mocking laughter of the fiend
that had prompted it. With the torture of remorse was paradoxically
mingled impotent anger at the cynicism of fate. His soul sickened at
the futility of things. He shrank with shuddering dismay from the ordeal
that lay before him. There were times when death beckoned to him with
tempting hands.
But men of Goddard’s stamp survive the shipwreck of their happiness.
They live on, and go about the world’s work doggedly, stubbornly,
blindly obeying the fighting instinct within them. The great tragedies
of the soul culminate not in death, but in dragging years of life, when
the grasshopper is a burden and desire fails. And such is the end of
Daniel Goddard’s tragedy. He lives to-day. His name is a household word.
He is the coming man, not of a party-clique, but of a nation. He has sat
upon the Treasury Bench. In the next Liberal Administration he will hold
Cabinet rank. He is envied, courted, flattered. The wildest ambitions
of his boyhood are in course of certain fulfilment. But he has lost for
ever the joy of victory; the springs of happiness are for ever closed by
the one overwhelming defeat of his life.
He is on the best of terms with Aloysius Gleam, and attends his wife’s
dinner-parties. Between them the past has only once been referred to,
and that silently. It was the first time he found himself alone with
her, one evening after dinner, Gleam having been summoned from the
drawing-room. Their eyes met for an embarrassing moment. Then Goddard
drew the familiar letter from his pocket-book, held it out for a few
seconds so as to catch her eye, and threw it into the fire. She watched
it blaze, and gave two or three little nods of acknowledgment. Then,
being in a comfortable chair, a bewitching costume, and a considerably
relieved frame of mind, she allowed the moisture to gather in her eyes.
But neither spoke until Gleam returned with a sprightly saying on his
lips. He threw himself into a chair.
“An old servant has just been to return me a sovereign she once stole.
It weighed on her conscience. I asked her about a certain diamond pin.
She looked haggard, and fled incontinently. Verily, all is for the
funniest in this funniest of all possible worlds.”
Rhodanthe broke into her silvery laugh. Goddard joined in grimly
and looked at her. For desire of her he had committed murder. He was
laughing and jesting with her husband and herself. Gleam was right. It
was the most humorous of worlds.
Then his mind went back to the terrible moment of his life, and his
heart gave a great heave, and his lips moved noiselessly.
“God, forgive me!”
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Demagogue and Lady Phayre, by William J. Locke