“Yes, monsieur. Madame wished to retire, but he would not allow it. I gathered that he said the mother of madame was waiting to see her, and that you, monsieur, were with her, and that she had sent money to get monsieur and madame out of their little difficulty. So he paid the men and got a receipt from them, and they left. And madame put on her things and went away with him in a fiacre. And I am sure, monsieur, that if I had supposed you would have any objection——”
George let her hand drop.
“When did they go?” he asked in a strangled whisper.
“Not long after you, monsieur. I am sure I thought every moment that you would be back together. But, ah! monsieur is ill! Can I not assist you? Some eau de vie——”
George had reeled into a chair and was breathing heavily. This last shock brought no pang; something began clicking and whirring in his head, and he thought he felt a hard, cold substance pressing closer and closer to his neck till he could not breathe, but began to choke and to gurgle, tearing with both hands at his throat to get the tightening grip away.
“Ah, the knife! the knife!” he burst out hoarsely, as he staggered up on to his feet with starting eyes and labouring breath. “Take her away! take her away! Don’t let her see me!”
And he fell to the floor in a fit, just as a loud knocking began on the outer door of the flat.
When he came to himself he was in the tender hands of the police. They treated him very civilly however, told him they could wait while he changed his clothes, which had been soaked through and through by the heavy rain, and caused George, who was too much exhausted in mind and body to feel even his uncertainty about his wife except as a dull pain, to think kindly of the French allowance for “extenuating circumstances.” He was quite broken down, and, regardless of the shivering fits which seized him in rapid succession, was ready to go with them at once, only asking on what charge he was arrested. On learning that it was for murderous assault, he seemed scarcely enough master of himself to feel relieved that it was no worse; and when they added that it might be changed to a graver one if the injured man, who had been taken to a hospital, should die before the trial, George merely nodded without any sign of vivid interest. Indeed, if he had had complete command of his feelings and his wits, he would not have cared two straws whether Mr. Gurton lived or died. The sentence George had incurred would certainly at the best be a term of imprisonment, at the end of which, whether the period were long or short, Nouna would be as effectually lost to him as if he were already dead.
George Lauriston was of the highly nervous, imaginative temperament to which ambition, hope, devotion are as the springs of life; when these were stopped or dried up, he became at once the withered husk of a man, a helpless log, not chafing at his confinement, not resigning himself to it, but living through the dull days like a brute, without emotion, almost without thought, weighed down by a leaden depression which threatened to end in the most fearful of all madness—a haunted melancholy. He learned without interest on the second day after his arrest that Mr. Gurton was dead. His formal appearance before the magistrate did him an unrecognised good, by rousing him out of his torpor into a strong sense of shame which bit into his very bones. To appear before a crowd, among whom were some of his Paris acquaintances, a prisoner, a social wreck, with every hope blighted, every honest ambition killed, was an ordeal for which he had to summon all his shaken manliness for one last gallant effort to show a stubborn face to fate. There was a worse experience before him. When he was brought into court to be formally committed for trial, the first faces he saw were those of Dicky Wood and Clarence Massey, the latter of whom wept like a child in open court, and was threatened with ejection for his repeated offers of bail to the extent of every penny he possessed. Lord Florencecourt was not present. It gave George a shock to hear that the charge against him was murder; the presence of his old comrades seemed to emphasise the gravity of the case, which he realised for the first time since his arrest. When asked if he had anything to say, he answered: “I am not guilty. I reserve my defence,” and remained stoically erect and grave while he was formally committed for trial and removed from the court.
On the following day, however, he received two visits; the first was from a well-known Parisian barrister, who had been retained for his defence by Clarence Massey, and had come to receive his client’s instructions. The second was from Ella Millard, who was paler, thinner, plainer than ever, and who trembled from head to foot as her hand touched his.