Thelma
can't come off the conqueror somehow! It's all very well to kill an
opponent in battle but the question is, can a man kill his inner,
grumbling, discontented, selfish Self? If he can't, what's the good of
him?"
As he was about to consider this point reflectively, Errington entered,
equipped for travelling, and whip in hand. His imagination had been at
work during the past few minutes, exaggerating all the horrors and
difficulties of Thelma's journey to the Altenfjord, till he was in a
perfect fever of irritable excitement.
"Come on Lorimer!" he cried. "There's no time to lose! Britta knows what
to do--she'll meet me at the station. I can't breathe in this wretched
house a moment longer--let's be off!"
Plunging out into the hall, he bade Morris summon a hansom,--and with a
few last instructions to that faithful servitor, and an encouraging kind
word and shake of the hand to Neville, who with a face of remorseful
misery, stood at the door to watch his departure,--he was gone. The
hansom containing him and Lorimer rattled rapidly towards the abode of
Sir Francis Lennox, but on entering Piccadilly, the vehicle was
compelled to go so slowly on account of the traffic, that Errington, who
every moment grew more and more impatient, could not stand it.
"By Jove! this is like a walking funeral!" he muttered. "I say Lorimer,
let's get out! We can do the rest on foot."
They stopped the cabman and paid him his fare--then hurried along
rapidly, Errington every now and then giving a fiercer clench to the
formidable horsewhip which was twisted together with his ordinary
walking-stick in such a manner as not to attract special attention.
"Coward and liar!" he muttered, as he thought of the man he was about to
punish. "He shall pay for his dastardly falsehood--by Jove he shall!
It'll be a precious long time before he shows himself in society any
more!"
Then he addressed Lorimer. "You may depend upon it he'll shout 'police!
police!' and make for the door," he observed. "You keep your back
against it, Lorimer! I don't care how many fines I've got to pay as long
as I can thrash him soundly!"
"All right!" Lorimer answered, and they quickened their pace. As they
neared the chambers which Sir Francis Lennox rented over a fashionable
jeweller's shop, they became aware of a small procession coming straight
towards them from the opposite direction. _Something_ was being carried
between four men who appeared to move with extreme care and
gentleness,--this something was surrounded by a crowd of boys and men
whose faces were full of morbid and frightened interest--the whole
_cortege_ was headed by a couple of solemn policemen. "You spoke of a
walking funeral just now," said Lorimer suddenly. "This looks uncommonly
like one."
Errington made no reply--he had only one idea in his mind,--the
determination to chastise and thoroughly disgrace Sir Francis. "I'll
hound him out of the clubs!" he thought indignantly. "His own set shall
know what a liar he is--and if I can help it he shall never hold up his
head again!"
Entirely occupied as he was with these reflections, he paid no heed to
anything that was going on in the street, and he scarcely heard
Lorimer's last observation. So that he was utterly surprised and taken
aback, when he, with Lorimer, was compelled to come to a halt before the
very door of the jeweller, Lennox's landlord, while the two policemen
cleared a passage through the crowd, saying in low tones, "Stand aside,
gentlemen, please!--stand aside," thus making gradual way for four
bearers, who, as was now plainly to be seen, carried a common wooden
stretcher covered with a cloth, under which lay what seemed, from its
outline, to be a human figure.
"What's the matter here?" asked Lorimer, with a curious cold thrill
running through him as he put the simple question.
One of the policemen answered readily enough.
"An accident, sir. Gentleman badly hurt. Down at Charing Cross
Station--tried to jump into a train when it had started,--foot
caught,--was thrown under the wheels and dragged along some
distance--doctor says he can't live, sir."
"Who is he,--what's his name?"
"Lennox, sir--leastways, that's the name on his card--and this is the
address. Sir Francis Lennox, I believe it is."
Errington uttered a sharp exclamation of horror,--at that moment the
jeweller came out of the recesses of his shop with uplifted hands and
bewildered countenance.
"An accident? Good Heavens!--Sir Francis! Up-stairs!--take him
up-stairs!" Here he addressed the bearers. "You should have gone round
to the private entrance--he mustn't be seen in the shop--frightening
away all my customers--here, pass through!--pass through, as quick as
you can!"
And they did pass through,--carrying their crushed burden tenderly along
by the shining glass cases and polished counters, where glimmered and
flashed jewels of every size and lustre for the adorning of the children
of this world,--slowly and carefully, step by step, they reached the
upper floor,--and there, in a luxurious apartment furnished with almost
feminine elegance, they lifted the inanimate form from the stretcher and
laid it down, still shrouded, on a velvet sofa, removing the last number
of _Truth_, and two of Zola's novels, to make room for the heavy,
unconscious head.
Errington and Lorimer stood at the doorway, completely overcome by the
suddenness of the event--they had followed the bearers up-stairs almost
mechanically,--exchanging no word or glance by the way,--and now they
watched in almost breathless suspense while a surgeon who was present,
gently turned back the cover that hid the injured man's features and
exposed them to full view. Was _that_ Sir Francis? that blood-smeared,
mangled creature?--_that_ the lascivious dandy,--the disciple of
no-creed and self-worship? Errington shuddered and averted his gaze from
that hideous face,--so horribly contorted,--yet otherwise deathlike in
its rigid stillness. There was a grave hush. The surgeon still bent over
him--touching here, probing there, with tenderness and skill,--but
finally he drew back with a hopeless shake of his head.
"Nothing can be done," he whispered. "Absolutely nothing!"
At that moment Sir Francis stirred,--he groaned and opened his
eyes;--what terrible eyes they were, filled with that look of intense
anguish, and something worse than anguish,--fear--frantic fear--coward
fear--fear that was almost more overpowering than his bodily suffering.
He stared wildly at the little group assembled--strange faces, so far as
he could make them out, that regarded him with evident compassion,--what
--what was all this--what did it mean? Death? No, no! he thought madly,
while his brain reeled with the idea--death? What _was_ death?--darkness,
annihilation, blackness--all that was horrible--unimaginable! God! he
would _not_ die! God!--who _was_ God? No matter--he would live;--he
would struggle against this heaviness,--this coldness--this pillar of
ice in which he was being slowly frozen--frozen--frozen!--inch by--inch!
He made a furious effort to move, and uttered a scream of agony, stabbed
through and through by torturing pain.
"Keep still!" said the surgeon pityingly.
Sir Francis heard him not. He wrestled with his bodily anguish till the
perspiration stood in large drops on his forehead. He raised himself,
gasping for breath, and glared about him like a trapped beast of prey.
"Give me brandy!" he muttered chokingly. "Quick--quick! Are you going to
let me die like a dog?--damn you all!"
The effort to move,--to speak,--exhausted his sinking strength--his
throat rattled,--he clenched his fists and made as though he would
spring off his couch--when a fearful contortion convulsed his whole
body,--his eyes rolled up and became fixed--he fell heavily
back,--_dead_!
Quietly the surgeon covered again what was now nothing,--nothing but a
mutilated corpse.
"It's all over!" he announce briefly.
Errington heard these words in sickened silence. All over! Was it
possible? So soon? All over!--and he had come too late to punish the
would-be ravisher of his wife's honor,--too late! He still held the whip
in his hand with which he had meant to chastise that--that distorted,
mangled lump of clay yonder, . . . pah! he could not bear to think of
it, and he turned away, faint and dizzy. He felt,--rather than saw the
staircase,--down which he dreamily went, followed by Lorimer.
The two policemen were in the hall scribbling the cut-and-dry
particulars of the accident in their note-books, which having done, they
marched off, attended by a wandering, bilious-looking penny-a-liner who
was anxious to write a successful account of the "Shocking Fatality," as
it was called in the next day's newspapers. Then the bearers departed
cheerfully, carrying with them the empty stretcher. Then the jeweller,
who seemed quite unmoved respecting the sudden death of his lodger,
chatted amicably with the surgeon about the reputation and various
demerits of the deceased,--and Errington and Lorimer, as they passed
through the shop, heard him speaking of a person hitherto unheard of,
namely, Lady Francis Lennox, who had been deserted by her husband for
the past six years, and who was living uncomplainingly the life of an
art-student in Germany with her married sister, maintaining, by the work
of her own hands, her one little child, a boy of five.
"He never allowed her a farthing," said the conversational jeweller.
"And she never asked him for one. Mr. Wiggins, his lawyer--firm of
Wiggins & Whizzer, Furnival's Inn,--told me all about his affairs. Oh
yes--he was a regular "masher"--tip-top! Not worth much, I should say.
He must have spent over a thousand a year in keeping up that little
place at St. John's Wood for Violet Vere. He owes me five hundred.
However, Mr. Wiggins will see everything fair, I've no doubt. I've just
wired to him, announcing the death. I don't suppose any one will regret
him--except, perhaps, the woman at St. John's Wood. But I believe she's
playing for a bigger stake just now." And, stimulated by this thought,
he drew out from a handsome morocco case a superb pendant of emeralds
and diamonds--a work of art, that glittered as he displayed it, like a
star on a frosty night.
"Pretty thing, isn't it?" he said proudly. "Eight hundred pounds, and
cheap, too! It was ordered for Miss Vere, two months ago, by the Duke of
Moorlands. I see he sold his collection of pictures the other day.
Luckily they fetched a tidy sum, so I'm pretty sure of the money for
this. He'll sell everything he's got to please her. Queer? Oh, not at
all! She's the rage just now,--I can't see anything in her myself,--but
I'm not a duke, you see--I'm obliged to be respectable!"
He laughed as he returned the pendant to its nest of padded amber satin,
and Errington,--sick at heart to hear such frivolous converse going on
while that crushed and lifeless form lay in the very room
above,--unwatched, uncared-for,--put his arm through Lorimer's and left
the shop.
Once in the open street, with the keen, cold air blowing against their
faces, they looked at each other blankly. Piccadilly was crowded; the
hurrying people passed and re-passed,--there were the shouts of omnibus
conductors and newsboys--the laughter of young men coming out of the St.
James's Hall Restaurant; all was as usual,--as, indeed, why should it
not? What matters the death of one man in a million? unless, indeed, it
be a man whose life, like a torch, uplifted in darkness, has enlightened
and cheered the world,--but the death of a mere fashionable "swell"
whose chief talent has been a trick of lying gracefully--who cares for
such a one? Society is instinctively relieved to hear that his place is
empty, and shall know him more. But Errington could not immediately