“In the darkness,” she whispered in his ear; “when the moon puts the house upon the statue!”
And he understood. Her world lay behind the vulgar, staring day. He turned. He heard the flutter of skirts—just caught the grey stockings, swift and light, as they flew behind the rhododendron masses. And she was gone.
He stood a long time, leaning upon that five-barred gate. ... It was the dressing-gong that recalled him at length to what seemed the present. By the conservatory door, as he went slowly in, he met his distinguished cousin—who was helping the girl he himself was to marry to enjoy her “final fling.” He looked at his cousin. He realised suddenly that he was merely vicious. There was no sun and wind, no flowers—there was depravity only, lust instead of laughter, excitement in place of happiness. It was calculated, not spontaneous. His mind was in it. Without joy it was. He was not natural.
“Not a girl in the whole lot fit to look at,” he exclaimed with peevish boredom, excusing himself stupidly for his illicit conduct. “I’m off in the morning.” He shrugged his blue-blooded shoulders. “These millionaires! Their shooting’s all right, but their mixum-gatherum week-ends—bah!” His gesture completed all he had to say about this one in particular. He glanced sharply, nastily, at his companion. “You look as if you’d found something!” he added, with a suggestive grin. “Or have you seen the ghost that was paid for with the house?” And he guffawed and let his eyeglass drop. “Lady Hermione will be asking for an explanation—eh?”
“Idiot!” replied Heber, and ran upstairs to dress for dinner.
But the word was wrong, he remembered, as he closed his door. It was lunatic he had meant to say, yet something more as well. He saw the smart, modern philanderer somehow as a beast.
2
It was nearly midnight when he went up to bed, after an evening of intolerable amusement. The abandoned moral attitude, the common rudeness, the contempt of all others but themselves, the ugly jests, the horseplay of tasteless minds that passed for gaiety, above all the shamelessness of the women that behind the cover of fine breeding aped emancipation, afflicted him to a boredom that touched desperation.
He understood now with a clarity unknown before. As with his cousin, so with these. They took life, he saw, with a brazen effrontery they thought was freedom, while yet it was life that they denied. He felt vampired and degraded; spontaneity went out of him. The fact that the geography of bedrooms was studied openly seemed an affirmation of vice that sickened him. Their ways were nauseous merely. He escaped—unnoticed.
He locked his door, went to the open window, and looked out into the night—then started. For silver dressed the lawn and park, the shadow of the building lay dark across the elaborate garden, and the moon, he noticed, was just high enough to put the house upon the statue. The chimney-stacks edged the pedestal precisely.