“You’ve called the tune; you must pay the piper.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’ll see you—cremated first!”
He stared at me a moment, his teeth showing, his eyes rounding in the dusk, his fists clinching and unclinching; then he, too, was gone. And I went and stood at the window, slinking into the curtains, and feeling myself the most abused cur in all London.
V
For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached me from Valentine.
“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.
“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my conscience be his footstool no longer.”
The fellow lived en prince in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst of a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.
“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll finish by and by.”
The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve, while I held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time, softening to his geniality.