While the servants talked in the kitchen the master had been sitting
quietly in the darkening study. All without and within the man was
eddying, swirling blackness. Heat beat and glowed upon his forehead, like
the radiation from molten metal; there was a winnowing and fanning as of
giant wings or leaping of furnace-fires. The blood in his throbbing
temples sang a dull, tuneless song. But presently he became aware of
another kind of singing.
It was a little hissing voice that came from the inside of the
oak-and-silver cellaret. And it sang a song that the man who sat near had
never heard before.
"Why think of the sharp lancet or the keen razor, why long for the swift
dismissing pang of the fragrant acid, or the leap down upon the
railway-track under the crushing, pulping iron wheels?" sang the little
voice. "I can give you Forgetfulness. I can bring you Death. Not that
death of the body which, for all you know, may mean a keener, more perfect
capability to live and suffer on the part of the Soul, stripped from the
earthly husk that has burdened and deadened it. The Death that is Death in
Life.... Here am I, ready to be your minister. Drink deep, and die!"
The man who heard lifted his white, wild, desperate face. The song came
more clearly.
"Wronged, outraged, betrayed of the God you blindly believed in and the
man and the woman who had your passionate love, your absolute faith, have
your revenge upon the One--as upon those two others. Degrade, cast down,
deface, the image of your Maker in you. Hurl back every gift of His,
prostitute and debase every faculty. Cease to believe, denying His Being
with the Will He forged and freed. Your Body, is it not your own, to do
with as you choose? Your Soul, is it not your helpless prisoner, while you
keep it in its cage of clay? Revenge, revenge, through the body and the
soul, upon Him who has mocked you! Do you not hear Him laugh as you sit
there desolate in the darkness--poor, broken reed that thought itself an
oak of might--alone, while your brother kisses the sweet lips that were
yours. David and Mildred are laughing too, at you. Hasten to efface every
memory of the lying kisses she has given you upon the bosoms of the
Daughters of Pleasure! Love, revel, drink! Drink, I say, and you will be
able to laugh at the One and the two...."
The little hissing voice drove Saxham mad. He leaped up, frenzied,
oversetting the chair. He tore open and threw wide the doors of the
oak-and-silver cellaret, and sought in it with shaking hands. He found a
bottle of champagne and the brandy-decanter, and a long tumbler, and
knocked off the wired neck of the bottle against the chimneypiece, and
crashed the foaming wine into the crystal, and filled up the glass with
brandy, and tossed off the stinging, bubbling, hissing mixture, and
laughed as he set the tumbler down.
The thing inside the oak-and-silver cellaret laughed too.
* * * * *
The hall-door shut heavily as Tait and the women in the kitchen sat and
listened. They had not spoken since the crash of the falling chair in the
room overhead. The area-door was open to the hot, sickly night air of
London in midsummer. Tait slid noiselessly out and listened as his master
hailed a passing hansom and jumped lightly in. The flaps banged together,
the driver pulled open the roof-trap and leaned down to catch the shouted
address. Tait's sharp ear caught it too, and the knowing grin that
decorated the features of the cabman was reflected upon his decent smug
countenance. His tongue was in his cheek as he returned to the kitchen.
For his master had given the direction of a house of ill-fame.
Thenceforwards the door would have shut for ever upon the strenuous,
honourable, cleanly, useful life of Owen Saxham, were it not that the For
Ever of humanity means only a little space of years with God--sometimes
only a little space of hours. Saxham did not need the evidence of the
shower of cheques from people who hated paying, the request from the
Committee of his Club that he would resign membership, the averted faces
of his acquaintances, the elaborate cordiality of his friends, to tell him
what he knew already. As the astute Tait had said, as Society knew
already, he was a ruined man. He had made money, but the enormous expenses
of the Defence swallowed up thousands. By bringing an action against the
Treasury he might have recovered a portion of the costs--so he was told,
but he had had enough of Law. He resigned his post at the Hospital, in
spite of a thinly-worded remonstrance from the Senior Physician. He
dismissed his servants generously. He disposed of his lease and furniture
and other property through a firm of auctioneers who robbed him, and sold
what stocks he had not realised upon, and wrote a farewell letter to his
mother, and sailed for South Africa. Thenceforwards he was to build his
nest with the birds of night, and rise from the stertorous sleep that is
born of drunkenness only to drink himself drunk again.
From assiduous letter-writing friends David heard reports of his brother
that grieved him deeply. He told these things to Mildred, and they shook
their heads over them and sighed together. Poor Owen! It was most
fortunate for his family that the Jury had taken so lenient a view of the
case ... otherwise ...! They were quite certain in their own minds that
poor Owen had been culpable, if not guilty. They were married six months
later. The Directoire hats were out of date, of course, but Louis Quinze,
with Watteau trimmings suited the six bridesmaids marvellously, and the
"Non Angli sed Angeli" choir rendered the Anthem and the "Voice that
Breathed" to perfection.
And Mildred, who never omitted her nightly prayers, made a special
petition for the reformation of poor misguided Owen upon her
wedding-night.
"Because we are so happy," she told David, who had found her kneeling,
white and exquisitely virginal in her lace and cambric draperies by the
bedside. "And _he_ must be so miserable. And you know, though I never
_really_ cared for him, he was perfectly devoted to me."
"Who could help it?" cooed enamoured David, and knelt and kissed his
bride's white feet. The white feet would show no ugly stains, although to
reach the bridal bed, towards which her husband now drew her, they must
tread upon his brother's bleeding heart.