A cloud settled on Sir Hildebrand's mind through which he saw immediate
things murkily. He passed days of unaccustomed loneliness and
inaction. He walked the familiar streets of London like one in a
dream. One afternoon he found himself gazing with unspeculative eye
into the window of a small Roman Catholic Repository where crucifixes
and statues of the Virgin and Child and rosaries and religious books
and pictures were exposed for sale. Until realisation of the objects
at which he had been staring dawned upon his mind, he had not been
aware of the nature of the shop. The shadow of a smile passed over his
face. He entered. An old man with a long white beard was behind the
counter.
"Do you keep scourges?" asked Sir Hildebrand.
"No, sir," replied the old man, somewhat astonished.
"That's unfortunate--very unfortunate," said Sir Hildebrand, regarding
him dully. "I'm in need of one."
"Even among certain of the religious orders the Discipline is forbidden
nowadays," replied the old man.
"Among certain others it is practised?"
"I believe so."
"Then scourges are procurable. I will ask you to get one--or have one
made according to religious pattern. I will pay fifteen shillings for
it."
"It could not possibly cost that--a mere matter of wood and string."
"I will pay neither more nor less," said Sir Hildebrand, laying on the
counter the cheque which he had endorsed and his card. "I--I have made
a vow. It's a matter of conscience. Kindly send it to the club
address."
He walked out of the shop somewhat lighter of heart, his instinct for
the scrupulous satisfied. The abominable cheque no longer burned
through letter-case and raiment and body and corroded his soul. He had
devoted the money to the purpose for which it was ear-marked. The
precision was soothed. In puzzling darkness he had also taken an
enormous psychological stride.
The familiar club became unbearable, his fellow-members abhorrent.
Friends and acquaintances outside--and they were legion--who, taking
pity on his loneliness, sought him out and invited him to their houses,
he shunned in a curious terror. He was forever meeting them in the
streets. Behind their masks of sympathy he read his wife's deadly
accusation and its confirmation which he had received from Haversham
and Bagot. When the scourge arrived--a business-like instrument in a
cardboard box--he sat for a long time in his club bedroom drawing the
knotted cords between his fingers, lost in retrospective thought....
And suddenly a scene flashed across his mind. Venice. The first days
of their honeymoon. The sun-baked Renaissance façade of a church in a
Campo bounded by a canal where their gondola lay waiting. A tattered,
one-legged, be-crutched beggar holding out his hat by the church
door.... He, Hildebrand, stalked majestically past, his wife
following. Near the _fondamenta_ he turned and discovered her in the
act of tendering from her purse a two-lire piece to the beggar who had
hobbled expectant in her wake. Hildebrand interposed a hand; the shock
accidentally jerked the coin from hers. It rolled. The one-legged
beggar threw himself prone, in order to seize it. But it rolled into
the canal. An agony of despair and supplication mounted from the
tatterdemalion's eyes.
"Oh, Hildebrand, give him another."
"Certainly not," he replied. "It's immoral to encourage mendicity."
She wept in the gondola. He thought her silly, and told her so. They
landed at the Molo and he took her to drink chocolate at Florian's on
the Piazza. She bent her meek head over the cup and the tears fell
into it. A well-dressed Venetian couple who sat at the next table
stared at her, passed remarks, and giggled outright with the ordinary
and exquisite Italian politeness.
"My dear Eliza," said Hildebrand, "if you can't help being a victim to
sickly sentimentality, at least, as my wife, you must learn to control
yourself in public."
And meekly she controlled herself and drank her salted chocolate. In
compliance with a timidly expressed desire, and in order to show his
forgiveness, he escorted her into the open square, and like any vulgar
Cook's tourist bought her a paper cornet of dried peas, wherewith, to
his self-conscious martyrdom, she fed the pigeons. Seeing an old man
some way off do the same, she scattered a few grains along the
curled-up brim of her Leghorn hat; and presently, so still she was and
gracious, an iridescent swarm enveloped her, eating from both hands
outstretched and encircling her head like a halo. For the moment she
was the embodiment of innocent happiness. But Hildebrand thought her
notoriously absurd, and when he saw Lord and Lady Benham approaching
them from the Piazzetta, he stepped forward and with an abrupt gesture
sent the pigeons scurrying away. And she looked for the vanished birds
with much the same scared piteousness as the one-legged beggar had
looked for the lost two-lire piece.
After thirty years the memory of that afternoon flamed vivid, as he
drew the strings of the idle scourge between his fingers. And then the
puzzling darkness overspread his mind.
After a while he replaced the scourge in the cardboard box and summoned
the club valet.
"Pack up all my things," said he. "I am going abroad to-morrow by the
eleven o'clock train from Victoria."