"You must come down on Miss Bellasys for compensation. She pays well, I have no doubt. You never get another sou from our side, if it were to keep you from starving. My second thought was the best, after all; it saved time and—money. (He put the note back into his purse.) I'll give you one caution, though. Keep out of Mr. Livingstone's way. If he meets you, after hearing all this, he'll break your neck, I believe in my conscience." So he left him.
For the second time that evening Willis looked in the glass—the reflection was not so satisfactory. Was that unseemly crumpled ruin the white tie, sublime in its scientific wrinkles, on which its author had gazed with a pardonable paternal pride? No wonder that he stamped in wrath, not the less bitter because impotent, while he shook off the dust from his garments as a testimony against Ralph Mohun.
He repaired the damages, though, to the best of his power, and then went off to keep his appointment; but the pâtés à la bechamelle were as ashes, and the gelée au marisquin as gall to his parched, disordered palate. He made himself so intensely disagreeable that poor Héloise thenceforth swore an enmity against his compatriots, which endured to the end of her brief misspent existence. "Gredin d'Anglais, va!" she was wont to say, grinding her little white teeth melodramatically, whenever she recalled that dreary entertainment, and the failure of her simple stratagems to enliven her saturnine host.
CHAPTER XXVII.
"Then let the funeral bells be tolled, a requiem be sung,
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young;
A dirge for her—the doubly dead, in that she died so young."
For the first few minutes after the train had moved off Guy was unable to collect his thoughts. As the tall figure of Mohun passed from his view, it seemed as if a sustaining prop had been suddenly cut away from under him, and he felt more than ever helpless. The stubborn strength of his character asserted itself before long, and he faced his great sorrow as he would have done an enemy in bodily shape; but neither then, nor for many days after, could he pursue any one train of reflection long unbroken.
First he began to think how Constance would look when he saw her. Would she be much changed? How beautiful she was the night they parted, with the blue myosotis gleaming through her bright hair! Would her eyes be as cold as he remembered them then (he had not seen their last look), or would they forgive him at once, and tell him so? Not if she knew all. And then, in hideous contrast to her pure stately beauty, there rose before him faces and figures which had shared his orgies during the past months, gay with paint and jewels, and meretricious ornament. There was a deeper horror in those mocking shapes than in the most loathsome phantasms of corporeal corruption that feverish dreams ever called up from the grave-yard. If his lips were unworthy, months ago, to touch Constance's cheek or hand, what were they now? He ground his teeth in the bitterness of self-condemnation. It would be easier to bear, if she met him coldly and proudly, than if she yielded at once, as her letter seemed to promise. Her letter! What became of the first one? If that had reached him, how much had been saved! Perhaps Constance's life—certainly much of his own dishonor. The idea did cross him that Flora might have been concerned in intercepting it, but it seemed improbable, and he drove it away. With all his revived devotion to Constance, he did not like to think hardly of her rival; in a lesser degree he had wronged her too.