‘Had I known,’ he answered, significantly, ‘it would not have been the lady I should have questioned.’
She raised her head haughtily.
‘And by what right do you question the lady now?’ she exclaimed. ‘Am I answerable to Walter Maxwell for my conduct? I take leave to think, sir, you might be better employed than in watching my movements.’
He was growing very angry and consequently calmer every second.
‘You had rather give no explanation?’ he said, with studied politeness.
She bowed her head in silence, but the colour was fading faster and faster from her cheek.
‘You decline it,’ he added, still very low, but through his set teeth.
‘Distinctly!’ answered the lady, adding, as only a woman would at such a moment, ‘You are neglecting the figure, the dance is going on without you.’
After this the pair derived but small gratification, we imagine, from the amusements of the evening. Walter Maxwell took the earliest opportunity of departing to cool his irritation in the night air, whither, as we dislike seeing a strong man wrestling with pain, we will not follow him. Mary Carmichael, however, bore her part bravely to the end; and although her answers were at times a little absent, and her laughter somewhat misplaced, none could have guessed by her outward bearing that she had so recently seen the great stake of her life’s happiness set, played for, and lost. She was not the only gambler in the hall. There was one heart amongst those dancers within a few yards of her that had resolved to-night to play the great game in which the odds were incalculably against it, and which to lose was ruin entire and irretrievable. There were a couple now gracefully moving through the figure of ‘the Purpose,’ as the music swelled and sank in triumphant harmony or pleading sweetness, of whom one was enjoying unconsciously the gratification of the moment, gay, kindly, generous, and impressionable, yet calm and dignified because thinking no evil, and the other with beating heart and swimming brain was steeped to the lips in the intoxication of that madness which comes but once in a lifetime, and seems to have but one fatal and invariable result.
Woe to the idolater! It is written on the tables of stone: Woe to the idolater! Be the image what it may, wood brass, or marble, or one ‘a little lower than the angels,’ whom the worshipper must needs exalt above the Being to whom the heavenly Host itself is but as dust in the hollow of a man’s hand. The punishment shall not come from abroad; it shall not be wrought by foreign enmity, nor owe its keenest pang to foreign injustice. If so, the sting would be extracted; the vengeance incomplete. No; Dagon alone shall crush the deluded votary who grovelled at Dagon’s pedestal. It is the hand he trusted that shall strike him to the heart, the feet he kissed that shall spurn him in the dust. When he shall have stripped himself of all to do his false god service; when he shall have lost his friends, his wealth, his fame, his self-respect, and forfeited his honour, and pawned his birthright, then, and not till then, shall the image of stone rock and totter and fall upon him and crush him to powder. Were there no world but this, it would indeed be better for that man that he had never been born.