The Drunkard

All that the girl had said in answer was that he must not talk in such a way. Of course it could never be. They must be content as they were, hard as it was. "I am very sorry, Gilbert dear, you can never know how sorry I am. But you know I care for you. That must be all."

He had sent her home by herself that night, paying the cabman and giving him the address in Kensington.

Then for an hour before going to bed he had walked up and down his sitting room in a welter of hope, fear, regret, desire, wonder and deep perplexity.

He had now lost all sense of honour, all measure of proportion. His desire filled him and racked his very bones. Sometimes he almost hated Rita; always he longed for her to be his, his very own.

Freed from all possible restraint, lord of himself – "that heritage of woe!" – he was now drinking more deeply, more madly than ever before in his life.

He was abnormal in an abnormal world which his insanity created. The savage torture he inflicted on himself shall be only indicated here. There are deeper hells yet, blacknesses more profound in which we shall see this unhappy soul!

Suffice it to say that for three red weeks he drove the chariot of his ruin more recklessly and furiously than ever towards hell.

And the result, as far as his blistering hunger was concerned, was always the same.

The girl led him on and repulsed him alternately. He never advanced a step towards his desire. Yet the longing grew in intensity and never left him for a moment.

He tried hard to fathom Rita's character, to get at the springs of her thoughts. He failed utterly, and for two reasons.

Firstly, he was in no state to see anything steadily. The powers of insight and analysis were alike deserting him. His mind had been affected before. Now his brain was becoming affected.

One morning, with shaking hand, bloodshot eyes and a bottle of whiskey before him on the table, he sat down to write out what he thought of Rita. The accustomed pen and paper, the material implements of his power, might bring him back what he seemed to be losing.

This is what he wrote, in large unsteady characters, entirely changed from the neat beautiful caligraphy of the past.

"Passionate and yet calculating at the same time; eager to rule and capable of ruling, though occasionally responsive to the right control; generous in confidence and trust, though with suspicion never very far away.

"Merrily false and frankly furtive in many of the actions of life. A dear egoist! yet capable of self-abandoning enthusiasm, a brilliant embryo really wanting the guiding hand and master brain but reluctant to accept them until the last moment."

There was more of it, all compact of his hopes and fears, an entirely false conception of her, an emanation of poison which, nevertheless, affords some indication of his mental state.

The sheet concluded: —

"A white and graceful yacht seriously setting out into dangerous waters with no more certainty than hangs upon the result of a toss up or the tinkle of a tambourine. Deeply desiring a pilot, but unwilling that he should come aboard too soon and spoil the fun of beating up into the wind to see what happens. Weak, but not with the charm of dependence and that trusting weakness which stiffens a man's arm."

A futile, miserable dissection with only a half-grain of truth in it.

Gilbert knew it for what it was directly it had been written. He crumpled it up with a curse and flung it into the fireplace.

Yet the truth about the girl was simple enough. She was only an exceptionally clever and attractive example of a perfectly well-defined and numerous type.

Lothian was ignorant of the type, had never suspected its existence in his limited experience of young women, that was all.

Rita Wallace was just this. Heredity had given her a quick, good brain and an infinite capacity for enjoyment. It was an accident also that she was a very lovely girl. All beautiful people are spoiled. Rita was spoiled at school. Girls and mistresses alike adored her. With hardly any interregnum she had been plumped into Podley's Pure Literature Library and begun to earn her own living.

She lived with a good, commonplace girl who worshipped her.

Except that she could attract them and that on the whole they were silly moths she knew nothing of men. Her heart, unawakened as yet save by school-girl affections, was a kind and tender little organ. But, with all her beauty and charm she was essentially shallow, from want of experience rather than from lack of temperament.

Gilbert Lothian had come to her as the most wonderful personality she had ever known. His letters were things that any girl in the world might be proud of receiving. He was giving her, now, a time which, upon each separate evening, was to her like a page out of the "Arabian Nights." Every day he gave her a tablet upon which "Sesame" was written.

Had he been free to ask her honourably, she would have married Gilbert within twenty-four hours, had it been possible. He was delightful to be with. She liked him to kiss her and say adoring things to her. Even his aberrations – of which of course she had become aware – only excited her interest. The bad boy drank far too many whiskies and sodas. Of course! She would cure him of that. If any one had told her that her nightly and delightful companion was an inebriate approaching the last stages of lingering sanity, Rita would have laughed in her informant's face.

She knew what a drunkard was! It was a horrid wretch who couldn't walk straight and who said, "My dearsh" – like the amusing pictures in "Punch."

Poor dear Gilbert's wife would be in a fury if she knew. But fortunately she didn't know, and she wasn't in England. Meanwhile, for a short time, life was entrancing, and why worry about the day after to-morrow?

It was ridiculous of Gilbert to want her to run away with him. That would be really wicked. He might kiss her as much as he liked, and when Mrs. Lothian came back they could still go on much as before. Certainly they would continue being friends and he would write her beautiful letters again.

"I'm a wicked little devil," she said to herself once or twice with a naughty inward chuckle, "but dear old Gilbert is so perfectly sweet, and I can do just what I like with him!"

Nearly three weeks had gone by. Gilbert and Rita had been together every evening, on the Saturday afternoons when she was free of Podley's Library, and for the whole of Sunday.

Gilbert had almost exhausted his invention in thinking out surprises for her night after night.

There had been many dull moments and hours when pleasure trembled in the balance. But no night had been quite a failure. The position was this.

Lothian, almost convinced that Rita was unassailable, assailed her still. She was sweet to him, gave her caresses but not herself. They had arrived at a curious sort of understanding. He bewailed with bitter and burning regret that he could not marry her. Lightly, only half sincerely, but to please him, she joined in his sorrow.

She had been seen about with him, constantly, in all sorts of places, and that London that knew him was beginning to talk. Of this Rita was perfectly unconscious.

He had written to his wife at Nice, letters so falsely sympathetic that he felt she must suspect something. He followed up every letter with a long, costly telegram. A telegram is not autograph and the very lesions of the prose conceal the lesions of the sender's dull intention. His physical state was beginning to be so alarming that he was putting himself constantly under the influence of bromide and such-like drugs. He went regularly to the Turkish Bath in Jermyn Street, had his face greased and hammered in the Haymarket each morning, and fought with a constantly growing terror against an advancing horror which he trembled to think might not be far off now.

Delirium Tremens.

But when Rita met him at night, drugs, massage and alcohol had had their influence and kept him still upon the brink.

In his well-cut evening clothes, with his face a little fatter, a little redder perhaps, he was still her clever, debonnair Gilbert.

A necessity to her now.

CHAPTER IV

THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS

"Let us have a quiet hour,
Let us hob-and-nob with Death."

    – Tennyson.
Three weeks passed. There was no change in the relations of Rita Wallace and Gilbert Lothian.

She was gay, tender, silent by turns, and her thirst for pleasure seemed unquenchable. She yielded nothing. Things were as they were. He was married: there was no more to be said, they must "dree their wierd" – endure their lot.

Often the man smiled bitterly to hear her girlish wisdom, uttered with almost complacent finality. It was not very difficult for her to endure. She had no conception of the dreadful state into which he had come, the torture he suffered.

When he was alone – during the long evil day when he could not see her – the perspiration his heated blood sent out upon his face and body seemed like the very night dews of the grave. He was the sensualist of whom Ruskin speaks, the sensualist with the shroud about his feet. All day long he fought for sufficient mastery over himself to go through the evening, fought against the feverish disease of parched throat and wandering eyes; senseless, dissolute, merciless.

And one dreadful flame burned steadily in the surrounding gloom —