He shrugged his shoulders. "Just as you like, sir," he replied.
In fact, we immediately returned into the auditorium, and two minutes later, I had traversed the promenade, descended the stairs, and was running like a hare across Leicester Square; alone, alone!
A cab took me to Bruton Street, and nine o'clock had barely struck when I was once again plain Brown, Sir William Dagmar's discreet and faithful valet.
I have never been intoxicated in my life, but it is often wise to assume a virtue, though you have it not, as the old proverb advises.
It seemed good to me to be drunk just then, and better still, the nearer I approached my master's house. As I mounted the steps I reeled. It cost me eighty seconds of painful effort to find the keyhole. I did not, as it happens, use it even when found, for the door opened suddenly, and I staggered forward into Sir Charles Venner's arms. I had expected him to confront me, nevertheless, it shocked me to find my expectations realized, and to be convinced how tenaciously he had clung to his first suspicions. I picked myself up and stood before him, a swaying, blinking maudlin figure. With much circumstance and drunken gravity, I explained to him that I had buried my mother, and that to steady my nerves I had taken afterwards a single glass of wine, which must surely have been drugged. Sir Charles treated me as tenderly as any woman could have done. He pretended to believe my story, and he protested that the rascally landlord, who had drugged me, deserved richly to be prosecuted. He guided me to my bed-room, and assisted me to bed. He then declared that he would prepare me a reviving draught, and taking a tumbler from my dressing-table, he dissolved with water a couple of tiny white pillules, which mixture he persuaded me to drink. I knew his purpose, of course. He wished to search me. But I was in no wise alarmed nor unwilling, for I had left everything I possessed at Bruton Street, and my pockets contained only my keys, and half a handful of loose silver. Saying to myself: "Morphia!" I swallowed the draught, and even drained the glass. Within five minutes I was sleeping like the dead, whereupon Sir Charles Venner searched to his heart's content, poor man.
VII
A DREAM OF LOVE
I awoke with a racking headache and an uneasy sensation that I had overslept myself. I sprang up and dipped my head into a basin of ice-cold water. That tranquillized the pain I suffered, yet my uneasiness continued, nay, it became intensified when I glanced at my watch, and saw that it was after nine o'clock. Very hastily I began to dress, but ere I came to my collar I paused and reflected. I am not a particularly introspective man, nor more than a skin-deep psychologist, but it was not a difficult thing to trace to its source the cause of my uneasiness. It patently derived its origin from the habits of servitude to which I had submitted myself during the last three months. There suddenly occurred to me to ask myself this question: "Agar Hume, how long will you permit such habits to persist?" I answered at once: "Why, a day or two, at most!"
The fact is, I was a rich man, and the pride of purse, the first pride I had ever experienced, was beginning to swell my head already.