Few men would have chosen their present wives if they had met--let us a.s.sume--fifty other women before they married. And when the ordinary, normal, decent man meets a woman better, clever, more desirable than the one he has, it is perfectly natural that he should admire her. He would be insensible if he did not. But with the normal man it stops there. He is obliged to be satisfied with his own wife. The chaos that riotous and unbalanced minds desire has not come yet. And if a man says that he _cannot_ love a wife who is virtuous and good, then Satan is in him.

"I cannot love her," Lothian thought of his wife, and in the surveyal of this fine brain and n.o.ble mind poisoned by alcohol it is proper to remember that two hours before he could not have thought this thing. It would have been utterly impossible.

Was it then the few recent administrations of poison that had changed him so terribly, brought him to this?

The Fiend Alcohol has a myriad dominations. A lad from the University gets drunk in honour on boat-race night--for the first time in his life--and tries to fight with a policeman. But he is only temporarily insane, becomes ashamed and wiser in the morning, and never does such a thing again.

Lothian had been poisoning himself, slowly, gradually, certainly for years. The disease which was latent in his blood, and for which he was in no way personally responsible, had been steadily undermining the forces of his nature.

He had injured his health and was coming near to gravely endangering his reputation. His work, rendered more brilliant and appealing at first by the unfair and unnatural stimulus of Alcohol, was trembling upon the brink of a debacle. He had inflicted hundreds of hours of misery and despair upon the woman he had married.

This, all this, was grave and disastrous enough.

But the awful thing that he was feeding and breeding within him--the "false Ego," to use the cold, scientific, and appallingly accurate definition of the doctors--had not achieved supreme power. Even during the last year of the three or four years of the poisoning process it had not become all-powerful. It had kept him from Church; it had kept him from the Eucharist; it had drawn one thick grey blanket after another between the eye of his soul and the vision of G.o.d. But kindly human instinct had remained unimpaired, and he had done many things _sub specie Crucis_--under the influence of, and for the sake of that Cross which was so surely and steadily receding from his days and pa.s.sing away to a dim and far horizon.

But there arrives a time when the pitcher that is filled drop by drop becomes full. The liquid trembles for a moment upon the brim and trickles over.

And there comes a sure moment in the life of the alcoholic when the fiend within waxes strong enough finally to strangle the old self, fills all the house and reigns supreme.

It is always something of relatively small importance that hastens the end--ensures the final plunge.

It was the last few whiskeys that sent honour and conscience flying away with scared faces from this man's soul. But they acted upon the poison of years, now risen to the very brim of the cup.

One more drop ...

People were getting up from the tables and leaving the restaurant. The band was resting, there was no more music at the moment, and the remaining diners were leaning over the tables and talking to each other in low, confidential tones.

Rita looked up suddenly. "What are we going to do now?" she said with her quick bright smile.

"When we went to Brighton together," Gilbert answered, "you told me that you had never been to a Music Hall. A box at the Empire is waiting for us. Let us go and see how you like it. If you don't, we can come away and go for a drive round London in a taxi. The air will be cooler now, and in the suburbs we may see the moon. But come and try. The night is yours, and I am yours, also. You are the Queen of the Dance of the Hours and I your Court Chamberlain."

"Oh, how perfectly sweet! Take me to the Empire."

As they stood upon the steps of the restaurant and the commissionaire whistled up a cab, Gilbert spoke to Rita in a low, husky voice.

"We ought to get there in time for the ballet," he said, "because it is the most perfect thing to be seen in Europe, outside Milan or St.

Petersburg. But we've ten minutes yet, at least. Shall I tell him to drive round?"

"Yes, Gilbert."

The taxi-meter glided away through the garish lights of the Strand, and then, unexpectedly, swerved into Craven Street towards the Embankment.

Almost immediately the interior of the cab grew dark.

Gilbert put his arm round Rita's waist and caught her hand with his. He drew her closer to him.

"Oh, my love!" he said with a sob in his voice. "My dear little Love; at last, at last!"

She did not resist. He caught her closer and closer and kissed her upon the cheeks, the eyes, the low-falling ma.s.ses of nut-brown, fragrant hair.

"Turn your face to me, darling."

His lips met hers for one long moment.

... He hardly heard her faint-voiced, "Gilbert, you mustn't." He sank back upon the cushions with a strange blankness and emptiness in his mind.

He had kissed her, her lovely lips had been pressed to his.

And, behold, it was nothing after all. It was just a little girl kissing him.

"Kiss met Kiss me again!" he said savagely. "You must, you must! Rita, my darling, _my darling_!"

She pressed her cool lips to his once more--how cool they were!--almost dutifully, with no revolt from his embrace, but as she might have kissed some girl friend at parting after a day together.

All evil, dominant pa.s.sions of his nature, hidden and sleeping within him for so long, were awake at last.

He had held Rita in his arms. Yet, whatever she might say or do in her reckless school-girl fashion, she was really absolutely innocent and virgin, untouched by pa.s.sion, incredibly ignorant of the red flame which burned within him now and which he would fain communicate to her.

"Are you unhappy, dearest?" he asked suddenly.

"Unhappy, Gilbert? With you? How could I be?"

And so daring innocence and wicked desire drove on through the streets of London--innocence a little tarnished, ignorance no longer, but pulsing with youth and the sense of adventure; absolutely unaware that it was playing with a man's soul.

The girl had read widely, but ever with the hunger for beauty, colour, music, the sterile, delicate emotions of others. One of the huge facts of life, the central, underlying fact of all the Romance, all the Poetry on which she was fed, had come to her at last and she did not recognise it.

Gilbert had held her in his arms and had kissed her. It was pleasant to be kissed and adored. It wasn't right--that she knew very well. Ethel would be horrified, if she knew. All sorts of proper, steady, ordinary people would be horrified, if _they_ knew. But they didn't and never would! And Gilbert wanted to kiss her so badly. She had known it all the time. Why shouldn't he, poor boy, if it made him happy? He was so kind and so charming. He was a magician with the key of fairyland.

He made love beautifully! This was the Dance of the Hours!

The cab stopped in front of the Empire. Led by a little page-boy who sprung up from somewhere, they pa.s.sed through the slowly-moving tide of men and women in the promenade to their box.

For a little s.p.a.ce Rita said nothing.

She settled herself in her chair and leaned upon the cushioned ledge of the box, gazing at the huge crowded theatre and at the shifting maze of colour upon the stage. She had removed the long glove from her right hand and her chin was supported by one white rounded arm. A very fair young Sybil she seemed, lost in the vague, empty s.p.a.ces of maiden thought.

Gilbert began to tell her about the dancers and to explain the ballet.

She had never seen anything like it before, and he pointed out its beauty, what a marvellous poem it really was; music, movement, and colour built up by almost incredible labour into one stupendous whole.

A dozen minor geniuses, each one a poet in his or her way, had been at work upon this triumphant shifting beauty, evanescent and lovely as a dream painted upon the sable curtains of sleep.

She listened and seemed to understand but made little comment.

Once she flashed a curious speculative look at him.

And, on his part, though he saw her lovelier than ever, he was chilled nevertheless. Grey veils seemed to be falling between him and the glow of his desire, falling one by one.

"Surgit amari aliquid?"--was it that?--but he could not let the moment escape him. It must and should be captured.