Part 63 (1/2)
Finally, his private expenditure had always been luxurious; and he was liable, it will be seen, to a kind of debt that is not easily kept waiting. On the whole, his bankers had behaved to him with great indulgence.
He fretted and fumed, turning over plan after plan as he walked, his curly head sunk in his shoulders, his hands behind his back. Presently he stopped--absently--in front of the inner wall of the room, where, above a heavy rosewood bookcase, brought from his Lincolns.h.i.+re house, a number of large framed photographs were hung close together.
His eye caught one and brightened. With an impatient gesture, like that of a reckless boy, he flung his thoughts away from him.
”If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer will take me out of it! What a _gorgeous_ time we had on that glacier!”
He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother's death, he had spent four months with an exploring party. The plate had caught the very grain and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice. He could _feel_ the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind. The man seated on the ladder over that bottomless creva.s.se was himself. And there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and that fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they had lost by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of the glacier. Ah, those had been years of _life_, those _Wanderjahre_! He ran over the photographs with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing itself in covetous memories of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical sh.o.r.es with their scattered palms, of superb rivers sweeping with sound and fury round innumerable islands, of great buildings ivory white amid the wealth of creepers which had pulled them into ruin, vacant now for ever of the voice of man, and ringed by untrodden forests.
”'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,'” he thought.
”Ah! but how much did the man who wrote that know about Cathay?”
And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares. How well, how indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! _Somewhere_, while we toil in the gloom and the crowd, there is _air_, there is _sea_, the joy of the sun, the life of the body, so good, so satisfying! This interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoa.r.s.e to no purpose--why! they could be shaken off at a moment's notice!
”However”--he turned on his heel--”suppose we try a few other trifles first. What time? those fellows won't have gone to bed yet!”
He took out his watch, then extinguished his candles, and made his way to the street. A hundred yards or so away from his own door he stopped before a well-known fas.h.i.+onable club, extremely small, and extremely select, where his mother's brother, the peer of the family, had introduced him when he was young and tender, and his mother's relations still cherished hopes of s.n.a.t.c.hing him as a brand from the burning.
The front rooms of the club were tolerably full still. He pa.s.sed on to the back. A door-keeper stationed in the pa.s.sage stepped back and silently opened a door. It closed instantly behind him, and Wharton found himself in a room with some twenty other young fellows playing baccarat, piles of s.h.i.+ning money on the tables, the electric lamps hung over each, lighting every detail of the scene with the same searching disenchanting glare.
”I say!” cried a young dark-haired fellow, like a dishevelled Lord Byron. ”Here comes the Labour leader--make room!”
And amid laughter and chaffing he was drawn down to the baccarat table, where a new deal was just beginning. He felt in his pockets for money; his eyes, intent and s.h.i.+ning, followed every motion of the dealer's hand. For three years now, ever since his return from his travels, the gambler's pa.s.sion had been stealing on him. Already this season he had lost and won--on the whole lost--large sums. And the fact was--so far--absolutely unknown except to the men with whom he played in this room.
CHAPTER III.
”If yer goin' downstairs, Nuss, you'd better take that there scuttle with yer, for the coals is gittin' low an' it ull save yer a journey!”
Marcella looked with amus.e.m.e.nt at her adviser--a small bandy-legged boy in s.h.i.+rt and knickerbockers, with black Jewish eyes in a strongly featured face. He stood leaning on the broom he had just been wielding, his sleeves rolled up to the shoulder showing his tiny arms; his expression sharp and keen as a hawk's.
”Well, Benny, then you look after your mother while I'm gone, and don't let any one in but the doctor.”
And Marcella turned for an instant towards the bed whereon lay a sick woman too feeble apparently to speak or move.
”I aint a goin' ter,” said the boy, shortly, beginning to sweep again with energy, ”an' if this 'ere baby cries, give it the bottle, I s'pose?”
”No, certainly not,” said Marcella, firmly; ”it has just had one. You sweep away, Benny, and let the baby alone.”
Benny looked a trifle wounded, but recovered himself immediately, and ran a general's eye over Marcella who was just about to leave the room.
”Now look 'ere, Nuss,” he said in a tone of pitying remonstrance, ”yer never a goin' down to that 'ere coal cellar without a light. Yer'll 'ave to come runnin' up all them stairs again--sure as I'm alive yer will!”
And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still masterfully considering her, let her go.
Marcella groped her way downstairs. The house was one of a type familiar all over the poorer parts of West Central London--the eighteenth-century house inhabited by law or fas.h.i.+on in the days of Dr. Johnson, now parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air, water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.
Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken bal.u.s.trade.
Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors of the swarming rooms she pa.s.sed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the bas.e.m.e.nt, that the house added one more to the standing shames of the district--an opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.