How they had applauded and joined in the choruses! how they had cheered the fat princ.i.p.al boy, how bright and _young_ it was!... Then a moment's hush, and the sharp-strung chords, when the orchestra dashed madly into the song, "Oh, Flo, 'twas _very_ wrong, you know!" How all the men had roared at the girl's conscious wink. From the first he had posed, but in those early terms he had been innocent of great wrong ... and now?...

The tw.a.n.g stopped with a little penultimate flourish before the final chord. The trams in the road rattled past. Mrs. Ebbage shouted in the kitchen, opining that her spouse must be "off 'is blooming onion"; and outside in the pa.s.sage Trot and Lucy giggled, high in the palate, hoping he would hear and ask them to come in.... He shook violently in his chair. To his excited imagination it seemed as if strange lights pa.s.sed before him; he heard strange sounds. He shook, and it seemed as if the scales fell from his eyes, letting all the horror of his life flash into his ken. There was a sense of the finality of things; he saw dimly a far-off purpose.

It was the _staleness_, the torture of sin, not a sorrowful sense of evil, that settled round him like a cloud. He had fed his appet.i.tes too heavily, and a total apoplexy of mind and soul had ensued.

Then came a knock at the door, and a grotesque figure entered--a large, gross old man, with heavy pouches under the eyes, with unsteady dribbling lips, dressed in a long parti-coloured dressing-gown.

He said he lived on the other side of the pa.s.sage, "and perhaps his young friend would come in and smoke a pipe with him." They went into a room much the same as Gobion's. A jug of steaming water stood on the table by a bottle of gin.

"My name is Belper," said the old gentleman, "the Reverend Peter Belper, though I no longer have a cure of souls. Will you have some Old Tom? I never work, but it makes me very thirsty."

Gobion drank; he was not in a state of mind to be surprised at anything.

This leering old satyr seemed quite natural and in proper sequence.

"I won't ask you what you've done," he said to Gobion. "A gentleman doesn't live here for no reason." He spoke with a wagging of his heavy jaw, with a hoa.r.s.e bleat, but an accent in which still lingered a trace of culture.

"No," said Gobion; "I suppose we're a shady lot in this hole."

"We are, we are; I myself am not what I was. Good heavens! I was once a vicar! I am now a moral object-lesson. I used to live by sermonizing, now I sermonize by living. A university man, may I ask?"

"Yes--Oxford."

"Really, there are then two of us. Mrs. Ebbage ought to congratulate herself."

"Have you been with her long?"

"Six years now. I have a moderate incompetence left; enough to be constantly drunk on."

"You find it really does deaden thought?"

"My dear sir, if it wasn't for gin I should long since have been in another h.e.l.l!"

A shrill laugh floated up from the kitchen.

"I call her 'laughing water,'" said Mr. Belper.

"You are poetic."

"Yes, my father was Belper the minor poet. I am the least poetic of his works."

He leered at the fire, shaking with drink--a shameless, dirty old man.

"I was a pretty fellow in my time," he said, licking the chops of remotest memory. "I had a conscience, and wrote harvest festival hymns with it."

Gobion filled his gla.s.s. "What do you do with yourself all day?"

"Drink and sleep, sleep and drink."

"Cheerful!"

"Yes, very; what else can I do? My mind is gone; if I think it's only blurred pain. I used to try and philosophise, but I can't think now. I don't believe in the nonsense people talk about the comforting powers of philosophy."

"Nor I. Philosophy seems to me to be an attempt to eat one's own soul, and indigestion generally results."

The old man filled his pipe anew, his face half in light half in shadow, the gross imprint of vice showing more sharply for the contrast, and suggesting still worse possibilities. Bad as it was, it had the prepotency of lower depths.

They often sat together thus, spending the long-drawn evenings over the gin-bottle, j.a.ping at society. Mr. Belper was ribald and cynical.

Nothing could shock either of them; their only prejudice was to persuade themselves that they had none.

It was a dark, dull time, too sordid for the actors to accrue any excitement at its lurid aspects. Night after night they sat till they were too befuddled to talk, each in turn providing the necessary amount of gin for the night's debauch. Belper punctuated the weary days by long sleeps, and Gobion by caressing Lucy Ebbage.

His health began to go slowly, and the torture of insomnia was added to his life.

One evening Mrs. Ebbage came into his room incoherently reminiscent, and sitting on the bed, rambled of the past, giving Gobion a strange glimpse of the habits of her cla.s.s.

She told of her youth in a Westminster slum, of her mother who had been kicked to death in a low public-house on the evening of the Derby. "'Er face was like a bit of liver after they'd done with 'er, and when the p'lice came in she was as dead as meat. I often think ovver."

She went on to talk of her daughter by her first marriage, who had died at seventeen, her coa.r.s.e voice trembling as she told how clever she had been at crochet work, and what a small foot she had. She showed Gobion a tiny white shoe the girl had worn. It was piteous to hear her--this scraggy, hard woman--with tears in her eyes, talking of her dead darling.

Then she said, "My 'ands are all mucky, and I've gone and soiled the shoe. Pore 'Arriet, it don't matter to 'er now."

She wiped her eyes with the corner of her ap.r.o.n, and with a change of manner--a somewhat futile arrogation of gaiety--"We're goin' to 'ave a bit of supper. Ebbage said as 'e could swallow a Welsh rarebit and a drop of something 'ot; come down and 'ave a bit."

"Yes," said Gobion slowly, "let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow----"

Mr. Belper came in and made coa.r.s.e jokes, to Mr. Ebbage's huge delight.

Gobion in his loneliness sat and became one of them, eating with his knife to avoid the appearance of eccentricity.

About eleven o'clock he went out with a jug to get some beer. The streets were heavy with fog, but he had not far to go, as the public-house he frequented was just round the corner. He chatted with the barmaid while she was drawing the beer, noticing with a smile the notice painted on the wall:

"WHERE ELSE CAN YOU GET

Such fine MELLOW 4d. RUM!

Such pure OLD 6d. WHISKEY!

Such luscious 4-1/2d. GIN!

Such MATCHLESS 6d. BRANDY!"

As he was going back a man in evening dress knocked against him.

"I beg pardon," he said. "I don't see--good G.o.d! Gobion!"

It was Scott.

Gobion took him into his room, and lit the little alabaster lamp, rich in gaudy flower work. The door opened, and the Reverend Peter Belper came in. The light shone on him, and he looked more Silenus-like than ever. "Beg pardon," he said, "thought you were alone." Gobion seized the momentary diversion of his coming to put on a tie and push his dirty cuffs under the sleeves of his coat.

"Oh! my dear old man," said Scott, looking round the room, "have you come to this? Why didn't you tell me?"

He put his arm on his shoulder, and Gobion drew nearer, shaking with emotion.

"I've been always thinking of you," said Scott. "It's been so lonely without you--so dull and lonely--we all miss you so. They said at Oxford that you'd been mixed up in some beastly newspaper scandal, but I knew of course that you'd rather die than do anything like that. I've been horribly afraid for you. You see, I couldn't find out where you'd got to or anything. You look terribly ill, old man; you must come out of this hole. Come away with me to-morrow, and when you're better you can make a new start."