"You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said smooth Tait, "and that makes me 'esitate in saying it. But I took on a gay, agreeable young woman of the free-and-easy sort, and went in for a bit o' pleasure, and more drink along with it. One nail drives out another, you know, sir. And if the young lady have thrown you hover – "
"Why, you damned, white-gilled, prying brute! you must have been reading my correspondence," said Saxham thickly, as he lifted the tumbler to his mouth.
Tait grinned. He could venture to tell his master, drunk, what he would not have dared to tell him sober.
"No need for that, sir. I've come and gone between this house and Pont Street too often not to know what was in the wind. Why, Captain Saxham was there with her often and often when you never suspected…"
The tumbler fell from Saxham's hand, and struck the fender, and smashed into a hundred glittering bits.
"Go!" said Tait's master, perfectly, suddenly, dangerously sober, and pointing to the door. The man delayed to finish his sentence.
"While you were in Holloway, sir, and all through the Trial…"
The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been left open. He vanished through it with harlequin-like agility as a terrible, white-faced black figure seemed to leap upon him…
"I've 'ad an escape for my life!" he said, having reached in a series of bounds the safer regions below stairs.
"Of the Doctor?.. Go on with your rubbishing nonsense!" said the cook.
"What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear?" demanded the housemaid, who was more imaginative, and cherished the buddings of a romantic passion for one who should be for ever nameless:
"Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by – that's what she've done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his dewy brow. "And seeing the Doctor for the first time since I've been in his service a bit overtook with liquor, and more free and easy like than customary – being a gentleman you or me would 'esitate to take a liberty with in the ordinary way o' things – I thought I'd let 'im know about the Goings On."
"Of them two…" interpolated the cook – "Her and the Captain?"
"Shameless, I call 'em!" exclaimed the incandescent housemaid as Tait signified assent.
"'Aven't they kep' it dark, though!" wondered the cook.
"They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite got over the desertion of the young woman he was to have married, and who had gone off with somebody else, "a precious downy couple. And what I say is – it's a Riddance!"
"How did 'e take it, pore dear?" gulped the housemaid.
"Like he's took everythink – that is, up to the present moment," admitted Tait. "But this is about the last straw."
The housemaid dissolved in tears.
"He'll get another young lady," said the cook confidently. "And him so 'andsome an' so clever, an' with such heaps of carriage-swells for patients."
Tait shook his prim, respectable head.
"The swells'll show their tongues to another man now, my gal, who 'asn't the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coat-sleeve. Whistle for patients now, that's what the doctor may. Why, every one of 'em has paid their bills, and them that haven't have asked for their accounts to be sent in. And it's 'Lady So-and-so presents her compliments,' instead of 'Dear Dr. Saxham.' Done for, he is, at least as far as the West End's concerned… Mind, I don't set up to be infallible, but experience justifies a certain amount of cocksureness, and what I say is – Done for! Best he can do is – sell the practice, and lease, and plate, and pictures, furniture, and so on, for whatever he can get – the movables would have provoked spirited biddin' at auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under the circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their valoo – and go Abroad." Tait's gesture was large and vague.
"Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel!" sighed the cook.
"And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he don't do away with hisself," sobbed the housemaid. "I do, reely!"
"With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles handy," added the cook.
"Not him!" said Tait. "I'm ready to lay any man the sporting odd against him committing sooicide. He's not the sort. Lord! what was that?"
That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs.
XVII
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