Part 50 (2/2)

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 h.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.l.

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 a.n.a.lysis 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.

”Pa.s.sionate 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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.

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