Part 51 (1/2)
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 Sat.u.r.day 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 una.s.sailable, a.s.sailed 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, ma.s.sage 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-n.o.b with Death.”
--_Tennyson._
Three weeks pa.s.sed. 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.