For Duke: I must judge him as he revealed himself to me, and baffle, if possible, the terrible spirit of what I dared not name to myself. Think only that at one wicked blow he was deprived of that whole structure of gentle romance that had saved his moral life from starvation!
Therefore it was that during the after hours of work I became for long a restless, flitting ghost haunted by a ghost. By street and rail and river, aimless apparently, but with one object through all, we went wandering through the dark mazes of the night and of the city, always hoping to light upon that we sought and always baffled. Theaters, restaurants, music halls, night shows and exhibitions of every description—any place that was calculated to attract in the least a nature responsive to the foppery of glitter or an appeal to the senses—we visited and explored, without result. Gambling dens—such as we could obtain the entree to—were a persistent lodestone to our restlessness; and here, especially, was I often conscious of that shadow of a shade—that dark ghost of my own phantom footsteps—standing silent at my elbow and watching—watching for him who never came.
Whithersoever we went the spur of the moment’s qualm goaded us. Any little experience, any chance allusion, was sufficient to suggest a possibility in the matter of the tendency of a lost and degenerate soul. Now we foregathered on the skirt of some fulsome and braying street preacher’s band; now suffered in a music hall under the skittish vapidity of a “lion comique”; now, perhaps, humbled our hot and weary pride in the luminous twilight of some old walled-in church, where evening service brought a few worshipers together.
I say “we,” yet in all this we acted independently. Only, whether in company or apart, the spirit of one common motive linked us together, and that so that I, at least, never felt alone.
So the weeks drew into months and Dolly herself was a phantom to my memory. By day the mechanism of our lives moved in the accustomed grooves; by night we were wandering birds of passage flitting dismally over waste places. More than once on a Sunday had I taken train to Epping, driven by the thought that some half-forgotten sentiment might by chance move other than me to the scene of old pleasant experiences. But she never came. Her “seasick weary bark” was nearing the rocks, and the breakers of eternity were already sounding in her ears.
Why postpone the inevitable or delay longer over description of that pointless pursuit that was to end only in catastrophe and death?
Christmas had come and gone with me—a mockery of good will and cheer—and a bitter January set in. That month the very demon of the east wind flew uncontrolled, and his steely sting was of a length and shrewdness to pierce thickest cloth and coverlet, frame and lung and heart itself.
One evening I had swallowed my supper and was preparing for my nightly prowl. Duke had remained at the office overtime, and my tramp was like to be unhaunted of its familiar. I had actually blown out the lamp, when his rapid footstep—I knew it well—came up the stairs, and in a moment the door was thrown open with a crash and I heard him breathing in the room.
“He’s gone!” he ejaculated in a quick, panting voice.
“No; I’m here, Duke!”