Part 52 (1/2)

He read it now without the slightest interest.

He glanced at the _Times_. Many important things were happening at home and abroad, but he gazed at all the news with a lack-l.u.s.tre eye.

Usually a keen and sympathetic observer of what went on in the world, for three weeks now he hadn't opened a paper.

As he closed the broad, crackling sheet on its mahogany holding rod, his glance fell upon the Births, Deaths and Marriages column.

A name among the deaths captured his wandering attention. A Mr. James Bethune d.i.c.kson Ingworth, C.B., was dead at Hampton Hall in Wilts.h.i.+re.

It was d.i.c.ker's uncle, of course! The boy would come into his estate now.

”It's a good thing for him,” Lothian thought. ”I don't suppose he's back from Italy yet. The old man must have died quite suddenly. I hope he'll settle down and won't be quite so uppish in the future.”

He was thinking drowsily, and quite kindly of d.i.c.kson, when he suddenly remembered something Mary had said on the night before she went to Nice.

He had tried to make mischief between them--so he had! And then there was that scene in the George at Wordingham, which Lothian had forgotten until now.

”What a c.o.c.k-sparrow Beelzebub the lad really is,” he said in his mind.

”And yet I liked him well enough. Even now he's not important enough to dislike. Rita likes him. She often talks of him. He took her out to dinner--yes, so he did--to some appalling little place in Wardour Street. She was speaking of it yesterday. He's written to her from Milan and Rome, too. She wanted to show me the letters and she was cross because I wasn't interested. She tried to pique me and I wouldn't be! What was it she said, oh, 'he's such nice curly hair.'”

He gazed into the empty fireplace before which he was sitting in a huge chair of green leather. The remembered words had struck some chords of memory. He frowned and puzzled over it in his drowsy numbed state, and then it came to him suddenly. Of course! The barmaid at Wordingham, Molly what's-her-name whom all the local bloods were after, had said just the same thing about Ingworth.

Little fools! They were all alike, fluffy little duffers... .

He looked up at the clock. It was twenty minutes to one. He had to meet Rita at the library as the hour struck.

He started. The door leading into the outside world shut with a clang.

His chains fell into their place once more upon the limbs of his body and soul.

He called a waiter, gulped down another peg, and got into a cab for the Podley Inst.i.tute.

The pleasant numbness had gone from him now. Once more he was upon the rack. What he saw with his mental vision was as the wild phantasmagoria of a dream ... a dark room in which a magic lantern is being worked, and fantastic, unexpected pictures flit across the screen. Pictures as disconnected as a pack of cards.

Rita was waiting upon the steps of the Inst.i.tute.

She wore a simple coat and skirt of dark brown tweed with a green line in it. Her face was pale. Her eyes were without sparkle--she also was exhausted by pleasure, come to the end of the Arabian Nights.

She got into the taxi-cab which was trembling with the power of the unemployed engines below it.

Tzim, tzim, tzim!

”Where shall we go, Gilbert?” she said, in a languid, uninterested voice.

He answered her in tones more cold and bloodless than her own. ”I don't know, Rita, and I don't care. Ce que vous voulez, Mademoiselle des livres sans reproche!”

She turned her white face on him for a moment, almost savage with impotent petulance. Then she thrust her head out of the window and coiled round to the waiting driver.

”Go to Madame Tussaud's,” she cried.

Tzim, tzim, bang-bang-bang, and then a long melancholy drone as the rows of houses slid backwards.

Gilbert turned on her. ”Why did you say that?” he asked bitterly.