Like a wild beast suddenly loosed George had him by the throat, and with hands to which his mad anger gave a grip of steel, he swayed the man’s huge frame once forward and flung him back with all his force. Gasping, choking, without time to cry out, Mr. Gurton staggered backwards, his head struck against the corner of an iron safe that stood behind him, and he fell heavily to the floor. Lauriston left the frightened errand-boy to pick him up, and rushed out of the room. He had suddenly remembered that there was one more chance; a fellow-clerk who was pretty well off lodged in the Rue Saint Honoré. He made his way in that direction, through the still heavily-falling rain, without another thought of the man he had just left, except a savage wish that he had not humiliated himself by applying to the cur.
But Mr. Gurton remained on the floor of his private room, and neither spoke nor moved.
CHAPTER XXVII.
In the excitement of a battle, when each man deals blows for his life, maddened by the clash of sabres, the roar of cannon, fierce cries, and ghastly sights, he gives and receives wounds of which he takes no account, absorbed in the struggle to beat the enemy back; so George, fighting for something dearer than his own safety, forgot his humiliation at Mr. Gurton’s hands, forgot his own outburst of passion and the rash act which followed, and still thought of nothing but Nouna’s wild, terror-struck face, and of the next effort he should make to remove the cause of her fear. The fellow-clerk, to whom he was now going to apply, was going out of town for the night; if he should have started already, there would be nothing to do but to telegraph to Lord Florencecourt and, while waiting for the help he would be sure to send immediately, to let the huissiers carry off what they would as security. This was a terrible contingency, on account of the shock it might give to Nouna; it had to be faced, however, for, on arriving at the lodging of his fellow-clerk, George learned that he had been gone half an hour.
It was not until his last hope of getting immediate help had thus disappeared that George, returning quickly towards his home, remembered what had happened in the office, and realised that by an assault upon his chief, which Mr. Gurton would probably describe as unprovoked, he had lost his situation, and perhaps got himself into a worse scrape still, for he had not waited to find out whether Mr. Gurton had been injured by the fall. George thought he would call at the bank and make inquiries, but on arriving at the corner of the street in which the building stood, he saw that a large and excited crowd had already collected, in spite of the rain, about the doors, and that some gendarmes were pressing the people back.
“I suppose the boy rushed out, shrieking ‘Murder!’ and brought up the whole neighbourhood,” thought George. “I hope to heaven he’s not seriously hurt.”
A sudden chill seized him and his heart seemed to become encased in stone. When a heavy man falls, striking his head on the way to the ground—oh, but nonsense, he should have seen, have known what he had done; he should have realised—What? George left a blank there which he could not fill. The possibility suggested by the sight of that swaying, excited mob, thronging, gesticulating fifty yards in front of him, with morbidly eager faces all upturned towards the windows of the first floor, where the bank was established, was too ghastly, too awful. He tried to laugh at himself for entertaining an idea so fanciful, so ridiculous, but the crowd fascinated him; he could not turn away without—Ah, yes, by going nearer, by joining the stream of people that was still flowing rapidly in that direction, he might learn what sort of a story they had got hold of. The murmurs grew louder as he got deeper and deeper in the throng, until, when he was well wedged in a feverishly eager phalanx of horror-mongers against whom the few gendarmes present were altogether powerless, his curiosity was satisfied to the full, for the story bandied from mouth to mouth was very definite indeed. A foreigner—English or German, it was not certain which, had had a quarrel with his employer, some said about a woman, some said about money, and had murdered him and escaped. Every version of the tale, however they might differ as to other details, contained the two last items—the murder and the escape of the murderer. George stayed deliberately, looked mechanically up at the windows with the rest of the crowd, and gathering in every different turn of the story, with strained keenness of hearing, hoping desperately to hear some one, brighter-witted and better-informed than the rest, contradict the spreading report and mock at the exaggerations of the herd. The moments dragged on; they were expecting a force of gendarmes, and the excitement increased. George, unable to move in the dense mass, was in a state of frenzied defiance of the crowd’s surmises, when a quick turn of every head to the left, and hoarse cry “Les voilà, les voilà,” told him that the police were coming, and the next instant he was being borne off, a helpless unit in the surging crowd as it retreated before the advancing gendarmes. Struggling to work his way out of the crush of people when free movement became possible, George stumbled against one of the gendarmes who had been waiting for assistance to disperse the mob. He was a slim man, scarcely of middle height, and it was he, and not the stalwart young Englishman, who suffered in the collision, staggering a step or two with an oath. But George shrank back with a great shock. If that ugly rumour should have any touch of truth, then his relation to the little slim man was already that of the hare to the hound, and the start would not be long delayed.
He was free from the crowd now, and was hurrying home sick at heart and giddy of brain, trying to realise the possibility he could no longer shirk. If Mr. Gurton were dead, he—George Lauriston—was a murderer. That would be quite clear to any judge and jury; George saw that, with the apparently passionless clearness with which one vivid idea can strike the mind in a state of white-hot excitement. He felt no shock at the act, but only at the consequences, not as they affected himself, but as they touched Nouna. George was not the man to waste emotion over the exit from the world of a man who, if he had had fifty more years of life, would only have used them to add to his record of evil; he had certainly never wished or intended to send him out of it, but, always excepting those ugly consequences, he as certainly did not wish him back. The whole matter presented itself to him only in one light: if the hideous rumour were true, he must leave his wife; what then would become of her? It was to him as if his very heart was pierced and quivering under the point of this torturing thought. He was not troubled by any imaginings of what might be his own fate; his whole soul being merely a storehouse for his devotion to his wife, as his body was a shield to protect and a tool to work for her, there would be nothing left to him worth a man’s thought if she were taken away. Taken away! Taken away! The very words as they passed through his brain turned him coward; the clank of his own boots on the stones of the street frightened him, and he turned round with the starting eyes and parted lips of the fugitive, to make sure that he was not already pursued, that before he could see his wife’s face again he would not be caught.
He was wet from head to foot and trembling like a leaf by the time he got inside the gate-way of the house. Everything was quiet; as he glanced at the wife of the concierge, sewing behind the glass door of her little room, at the children playing in the yard, at the cat curled up on the stairs, he rebuked himself for his folly in taking a wild mob-rumour for a truth, and comforted by the homely, every-day aspect the house seemed to wear, he ran up the stairs and let himself into the top flat with a lightening heart. At any rate he was sure of one thing: if the worst came to the worst, they could not take him now without one more long look at his darling. In the terrible, searing excitement of the last hour, all George’s habitual self-control had given way, and the great passion of his life, which was always burning steadily in the depths of his heart, leapt up in towers of flame, showing luridly every weak spot in his nature. Like the sailor who bursts open the spirit-stores when the ship is past saving, George sprang across the sitting-room with a fierce yearning for his wife’s lips, with words more eloquent, caresses more tender, than any he had ever yet showered upon her, ready for one last interview which was to sum up all the happiness they had enjoyed together, to stamp upon her heart and mind, once and for ever, the memory of the man who had held her as the jewel of his soul, who set no value on his own life without her.
He opened the bedroom door with clammy, trembling hands. Was he blinded by the rushing blood in his brain, or dazed by the sudden change from the lamp-light in the hall to the murky dimness of the fading daylight? Or was Nouna really not there? He crossed the floor to the bed, calling to her hoarsely by name, and hunting with his hands over every inch of the tumbled quilt where she had lain that afternoon. He went out on to the balcony, walking from end to end of it with his hand along the wet and slippery railing, feeling for her all the way, as if unable to trust to the senses of sight and sound. Then he returned to the sitting-room and still groping in the dusk, gave forth a loud cry that made the roof ring.