He read it now without the slightest interest.

He glanced at the _Times_. Many important things were happening at home and abroad, but he gazed at all the news with a lack-l.u.s.tre eye.

Usually a keen and sympathetic observer of what went on in the world, for three weeks now he hadn"t opened a paper.

As he closed the broad, crackling sheet on its mahogany holding rod, his glance fell upon the Births, Deaths and Marriages column.

A name among the deaths captured his wandering attention. A Mr. James Bethune d.i.c.kson Ingworth, C.B., was dead at Hampton Hall in Wiltshire.

It was d.i.c.ker"s uncle, of course! The boy would come into his estate now.

"It"s a good thing for him," Lothian thought. "I don"t suppose he"s back from Italy yet. The old man must have died quite suddenly. I hope he"ll settle down and won"t be quite so uppish in the future."

He was thinking drowsily, and quite kindly of d.i.c.kson, when he suddenly remembered something Mary had said on the night before she went to Nice.

He had tried to make mischief between them--so he had! And then there was that scene in the George at Wordingham, which Lothian had forgotten until now.

"What a c.o.c.k-sparrow Beelzebub the lad really is," he said in his mind.

"And yet I liked him well enough. Even now he"s not important enough to dislike. Rita likes him. She often talks of him. He took her out to dinner--yes, so he did--to some appalling little place in Wardour Street. She was speaking of it yesterday. He"s written to her from Milan and Rome, too. She wanted to show me the letters and she was cross because I wasn"t interested. She tried to pique me and I wouldn"t be! What was it she said, oh, "he"s such nice curly hair.""

He gazed into the empty fireplace before which he was sitting in a huge chair of green leather. The remembered words had struck some chords of memory. He frowned and puzzled over it in his drowsy numbed state, and then it came to him suddenly. Of course! The barmaid at Wordingham, Molly what"s-her-name whom all the local bloods were after, had said just the same thing about Ingworth.

Little fools! They were all alike, fluffy little duffers... .

He looked up at the clock. It was twenty minutes to one. He had to meet Rita at the library as the hour struck.

He started. The door leading into the outside world shut with a clang.

His chains fell into their place once more upon the limbs of his body and soul.

He called a waiter, gulped down another peg, and got into a cab for the Podley Inst.i.tute.

The pleasant numbness had gone from him now. Once more he was upon the rack. What he saw with his mental vision was as the wild phantasmagoria of a dream ... a dark room in which a magic lantern is being worked, and fantastic, unexpected pictures flit across the screen. Pictures as disconnected as a pack of cards.

Rita was waiting upon the steps of the Inst.i.tute.

She wore a simple coat and skirt of dark brown tweed with a green line in it. Her face was pale. Her eyes were without sparkle--she also was exhausted by pleasure, come to the end of the Arabian Nights.

She got into the taxi-cab which was trembling with the power of the unemployed engines below it.

Tzim, tzim, tzim!

"Where shall we go, Gilbert?" she said, in a languid, uninterested voice.

He answered her in tones more cold and bloodless than her own. "I don"t know, Rita, and I don"t care. Ce que vous voulez, Mademoiselle des livres sans reproche!"

She turned her white face on him for a moment, almost savage with impotent petulance. Then she thrust her head out of the window and coiled round to the waiting driver.

"Go to Madame Tussaud"s," she cried.

Tzim, tzim, bang-bang-bang, and then a long melancholy drone as the rows of houses slid backwards.

Gilbert turned on her. "Why did you say that?" he asked bitterly.

"What difference _does_ it make?" she replied. "You didn"t seem to care where we went for this last hour or two. I said the first thing that came into my mind. I suppose we can get lunch at Madame Tussaud"s.

I"ve never been there before. At any rate, I expect they can manage a sponge cake for us. I don"t want anything more."

--"Yes, it"s better for us both. It"s a relief to me to think that the end has come. No, Rita dear, I don"t want your hand. Let us make an end now--a diminuendo. It must be. Let it be. You"ve said it often yourself."

She bit her lips for a second. Then her eyes flashed. She put her arms round his neck and drew him to her. "You shan"t!" she said. "You shan"t glide away from me like this."

Every nerve in his body began to tremble. His skin p.r.i.c.ked and grew hot.

"What will you give?" he asked in a m.u.f.fled voice.

"I? What I choose to give!" she replied. "Gillie, I"ll do what I like with you."

She shrank back in the corner of the cab with a little cry. Lothian"s face was red and blazing with anger.

"No names like that, Rita!" he said roughly. "You shan"t call me that."

It was a despairing cry of drowning conscience, honour bleeding to death, dissolving dignity and manhood.

However much he might long for her: however strongly he was enchained, it was a blot, an indignity, an outrage, that this girl should call him by the familiar home name. That was Mary"s name for him. Mrs. Gilbert Lothian alone had the right to say that.

Just then the taxi-metre stopped outside the big red erection in the Marylebone Road, an unusual and fantastic silhouette against the heavy sky.

They went in together, and there was a chill over them both. They felt, on this grey day, as people who have lived for pleasure, sensation, and have fed too long on honeycomb, must ever feel; the bitterness of the fruit with the fair red and yellow rind. Ashes were in their mouths, an acrid flavour within their souls.

It is always and for ever thus, if men could only realise it. Since the Cross rose in the sky, the hectic joys of sin have been mingled with bitterness, torture, cold.

The frightful "Colloque Sentimental" of Verlaine expresses these two people, at this moment, well enough. Written by a temperamental saint turned satyr and nearly always influenced by drink; translated by a young English poet whose wings were always beating in vain against the prison wall he himself had built; you have these sad companions... .

_Into the lonely park all frozen fast, Awhile ago there were two forms who pa.s.sed.

Lo, are their lips fallen and their eyes dead, Hardly shall a man hear the words they said.

Into the lonely park all frozen fast There came two shadows who recall the past.

"Dost thou remember our old ecstasy?"

"Wherefore should I possess that memory?"

"Doth thy heart beat at my sole name alway?

Still dost thou see my soul in visions?" "Nay!"--_

And on such a day as this, with such a weight as this upon their tired hearts, they entered the halls of Waxwork and stood forlorn among that dumb cloistered company.

They pa.s.sed through "Room No. 1. Commencing Right-hand side" and their steps echoed upon the floor. On this day and at this hour hardly any visitors were there; only a few groups moved from figure to figure and talked in hissing whispers as if they were in some church.

All around them they saw lifeless and yet half convincing dolls in rich tarnished habiliments. They walked, as it were, in a mausoleum of dead kings, and the livid light which fell upon them from the gla.s.s roof above made the sordid unreality more real.

"There"s Charles the First," Rita said drearily.