At last she said she was hungry, and reluctantly he took her downstairs to the dining room, crowded and noisy, with dancing going on to the music of a fiendish orchestra. Gone was his pride, gone was his kindly protectiveness. He was overwhelmed with shame; he saw himself a dupe, when he had fancied himself a hero.[Pg 39]
He couldn’t eat. He sat there across the table, in sullen wretchedness, keeping his eyes off her detestable face, listening to her calm voice, telling him that it was “better for them both to part now.” She was affable, but she made no effort to be kind. She had nothing to say about love, about grief at parting. She placidly ignored their romance. She urged him to be “sensible,” and a “good boy.” And with every word she made a fresh wound in his quivering, childish soul—scars never to be healed.
He was sitting with his back to the door, and he hadn’t seen old Van Brink enter. He had looked up in alarm at a shriek from Esther, and there was that face, convulsed with hatred—hatred for him! Then the shot, the crowd, the atrocious sense of unreality, of insane confusion, the pain in his wrist.
Some one had hurried him off in a taxi. He had looked back blankly from the doorway at the brightly lighted room, at an old man held by force from following him. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be real!
Once again he picked up the newspaper and looked at that shameful headline:
TRAGEDY NARROWLY AVERTED AT
HOTEL TRESSILLON
It occurred to young Thomas Ellinger that perhaps the tragedy had not, after all, been averted.
IX
“Everything passes,” runs the old saying, and the contrary is also true. Nothing passes.
If you had looked at that stalwart and serious gentleman in the box, correct, evidently prosperous, with his honest and rather blank gaze, you would certainly have imagined him to be one of those fortunate creatures without a history, a soul without a scar. He was there with an agreeable, well-bred wife and a pretty young daughter, and he was apparently enjoying the play with a temperate and sedate enjoyment—interested, but not very much interested, you know.