Jones nodded.
"To Paliser?"
But it seemed too rough and, to take the edge off, Jones added. "It may
not be true."
"How did you hear?"
"Verelst told me. He dined there last night."
Lennox turned on his heel. Futilely in that hell to which one may look
back and see that it was not hell but purgatory prior to paradise,
futilely there he had sought the reason of his damnation. A few minutes
before he had thought that Cassy's story revealed it. In the light of it
he had seen himself condemned, as many another has been, for crimes
which he had not committed. But he had seen, too, the order of release.
He had only a word to say. He was going to Park Avenue to say it.
When Jones was below with Cassy so he had thought and not without
gratitude to Paliser either. If the cad had held his tongue,
enlightenment might have been withheld until to his spirit, freed
perhaps in Flanders, had come the revelation. Personally he was
therefore grateful to Paliser. But vicariously he was bitter. For his
treatment of that girl, punishment should follow.
That girl! Obscurely, in the laboratory of the senses where, without our
knowledge, often against our will, our impulses are dictated, a process,
intricate and interesting, which Stendhal called crystallisation, was at
work.
Unaware of that, conscious only of the moment, to his face had come the
look and menace of the wolf.
Now----!
"There is a book over there," Jones, who was watching him, cut in. "It
is Seneca's 'De animae tranquilitate.' Take a peek at it. It will tell
you, what it has told me, that whatever happens, happens because it had
to happen and because it could not happen otherwise. There is no sounder
lesson in mental tranquillity."
But for all Lennox heard of that he might then have been dead. Without
knowing what he was doing, he sat down. Paliser, Margaret! Margaret,
Paliser! Before him, on encephalic films, their forms and faces moved as
clearly as though both were in the room. He saw them approaching, saw
them embrace. The obsession of jealousy that creates the image,
projected it. He closed his eyes, covered his face with his hands. The
image got behind them. It persisted but less insistently. The figures
were still there. It was their consistence that seemed to fade. Where
they had been were shadows--evil, shallow, malign, perverse, lurid as
torches and yet but shades. For the jealousy that inflames love can also
consume it and, when it does, it leaves ashes that are either sterile
with indifference or potent with hate. At the shadows that were torches
Lennox looked with closed eyes. Obscurely, without his knowledge, in the
laboratory of his senses, crystallisation was at work.