"The earth buildeth on the earth castles and towers;
The earth sayeth to the earth, 'All shall be ours;'
The earth walketh on the earth, glistering like gold;
The earth goeth to the earth sooner than it wold."
John was late next morning. He had not slept for many nights, and the
heavy slumber of entire exhaustion fell on him towards dawn. It was
nearly midday when he re-entered the sitting-room where he had sat up so
late the night before.
He went to Archie's room to see whether he had come in; but it was
empty.
He was impatient to be gone, to get away from that marble-topped
side-table, and the horsehair chairs, and the gilt clock on the
mantelpiece. At least, he thought he wished to get away from these
things; but it was from himself that he really wanted to get away--from
this miserable tortured self that was all that was left of him in this
his hour of weakness and prostration; the hour which inevitably succeeds
all great exertions of strength. How could he drag this wretched
creature about with him? He abhorred himself; the thought of being with
himself was intolerable. It seems hard that the nobler side of human
nature, which can cheer and urge its weaker brother up such steep paths
of duty and self-sacrifice, should desert us when the summit is
achieved, leaving the weaker to wail unreproved over its bleeding feet
and rent garments till we madden at the sound.
An overwhelming sense of loneliness fell on John as he sat waiting for
Archie to come in. He had no strong, earnest, steadfast self to bear
him company. He felt deserted, lost.
Who has not experienced it, that fierce depression and loathing of all
life, which, though at the time we know it not, is only the writhing and
fainting of the starved human affections! The very ordinary sources from
which the sharpest suffering springs, shows us later on how narrow are
the limits within which our common human nature works, and from which
yet irradiate such diversities of pain.
Alphonse disturbed him at last to ask whether he and "Monsieur" would
dine at _table d'hote_. "Monsieur," with a glance at Archie's door, had
not yet come in.
John said they would both dine; and then, roused somewhat by the
interruption, an idea struck him. Had Archie, in the excitement of the
moment, gone back to England without telling him?
He went to the room, but there were no evidences of departure. On the
bed the clothes were thrown which Archie had worn on the previous day.
The gold watch John had given him was on the dressing-table. He had
evidently left it there on purpose, not caring, perhaps, to risk taking
it with him. All the paraphernalia of a man who studies his appearance
were strewed on the table. There was his little moustache-brush, and
phial of _brilliantine_ to burnish it. John knew that he would never
have left _that_ behind. Archie had evidently intended to return.
In the mean while hour succeeded hour, but he did not come. That Archie
should have been out all night was not surprising, but that he should be
still out now in his evening clothes in the daytime, began to be
incomprehensible. After a few premonitory tremors of misgiving, which,
man-like, he laughed at himself for entertaining, John took alarm.
Evening fell, and still no Archie. And then a hideous night followed, in
which John forgot everything in heaven above or earth beneath except
Archie. The police were informed. The actress at whose house he had
supped after the play was interviewed, but could only vociferate between
her sobs that he had left her house with the remainder of her party in
the early hours of the morning, and she had not seen him since.
Directly the office opened, John telegraphed to his colonel to know if
he had returned to London. The answer came, "Absent without leave."
John remembered that he had only three days' leave, and that the third
day was up yesterday. Archie would not have forgotten that.
A nightmare of a day passed. John had been out during the greater part
of it, rushing back at intervals in the hope, that was no longer
anything but a masked despair, of finding Archie in his rooms on his
return.
In the dusk of the afternoon he came back once more, and peered for the
twentieth time into the littered bedroom, which the frightened servants
had left exactly as Archie had left it. He was standing in the doorway
looking into the empty room, where a certain horror was beginning to
gather round the familiar objects with which it was strewed, when a
voice spoke to him.
It was the superintendent of police to whom he had gone long ago--the
night before--when first the horror began. Alphonse, who had shown him
up, was watching through the doorway.
The man said something in French. John did not hear him, but it did not
matter much. He knew. They went downstairs together. Alphonse brought
him his hat and stick. The other waiters were gathered in a little knot
at the _table d'hote_ door. A fiacre was waiting under the archway. John
and the superintendent got into it, and it drove off at once without
waiting for directions. They were lighting the lamps in the streets. The
dusk was falling, falling like the shadow of death. They drove deeper
and ever deeper into it.
Time ceased to be.
"Nous voici, Monsieur," said the man, gravely, as they pulled up before
a building, the long low outline of which was dimly visible.
John knew it was the Morgue.
He followed his guide down a white-washed passage into a long room.
There was a cluster of people at the further end, towards which the man
was leading him, and in the dusk there was a subdued whispering, and a
sound of trickling water.
As they reached the further end, some one turned on the electric light,
and it fell full on a man's figure on one of the slabs. A little crowd
of people were peering through the glass screen at the toy which the
Seine had tired of and cast aside.
"Ah! qu'il est beau," said a high woman's voice.
John shaded his eyes and looked.
The face was turned away, but John knew the hair, fair to whiteness in
that brilliant light, as he had often seen it in London ball-rooms.
They let him through the glass screen which kept off the crowd, and,
oblivious of the many eyes watching him, John bent over the slab and
touched the clenched marble hand with the signet-ring on it which he had
given him when they were at Oxford together.
Yes, it was Archie.
The dead face was set in the nervous grin with which he had been wont in
life to meet the inevitable and the distasteful.
The blue pencillings of dissolution had touched to inexorable
distinctness the thin lines of dissipation in the cheek and at the
corners of the mouth. The death of the body had overtaken the creeping
death of the soul. Their landmarks met.
The poor beautiful effeminate face, devoid of all that makes death
bearable, stared up at the electric light.
An impotent overwhelming compassion, as for some ephemeral irresponsible
being of another creation, who knows not how to guide itself in this
grim world of law, and has wandered blindfold within the sweep of a vast
machinery of which it knew nothing, wrung John's heart. He hid his face
in his hands.