The failure of the motor after the “Pot and Kettle” party had been unfortunate, and the lack of oil subsequently explained by the drunkenness of the chauffeur who had been discharged on Miss Jaffray’s return to town. Phil Gallatin had found a farmhouse, where Nina had been made comfortable. There was no gasoline within five miles of the place. The chauffeur was unable to cope with the situation and there was nothing for it but to wait until morning, when the farmer himself drove Gallatin to the nearest village for the needed fuel.
Under other circumstances it might have been an amusing experience, but the events of the evening had put a damper on them both. Nina’s impudence was smothered in her fur collar, and she had sat sulkily through the hours of darkness, gazing at the stove, saying not a word, and the delinquent chauffeur had meanwhile gone to sleep on the floor of the kitchen. Morning saw them safe in town at an early hour, and it had been at Nina’s request that the incident had not been mentioned. Until to-day Gallatin had not given it a thought. He had not seen Nina, and while he had frequently thought of her, the flight of time and the press of affairs had given her singular confession a perspective that took something from its importance. But Jane’s attitude had suddenly made Nina the dominant figure in the situation. Whatever mischief she had created in his own affairs, she had not deserved this!
He entered his rooms filled with bitterness toward Henry Loring, dull resentment toward Jane. Everything in the world that he hoped for had centered about her image, and he loved her for what she had been to him, what she had made of him and for what he had made of himself, but in his mind a definite conviction had grown, that in so far as he was concerned their relations were now at an end. He had abased himself enough and further efforts at a reconciliation could only demean his dignity, already jeopardized, and his pride, already mortally wounded.
He threw himself heavily into his Morris chair and tried to think about other things. Upon the table there was a legal volume which he had brought up from the office the night before, filled with slips of paper for the reference pages which Tooker had placed there for him. He took it up and began to read, but his mind wandered. The type swam before his eyes and in its place Jane’s face appeared, ivory-colored as he had last seen it, and her eyes dark with pain and incomprehension looked scornfully out of the page. He closed the book and gazed around the room, into the dusty corners, with their mementos of his career: the oar that had been his when he had stroked the crew of his university, boxing gloves, foils and mask, photographs of football teams in which he had been interested, a small cabinet of cups—golf and steeplechase prizes, a policeman’s helmet, the spoils of a college prank, his personal library (his father’s was in a storage warehouse), trinkets of all sorts, steins innumerable, a tiny satin slipper, some ivories and—a small gold flask.
He got out of his chair, picked the flask up, and examined it as if it had been something he had never seen before. He ran his fingers over the chasing of the cup, noted the dents that had been made when it had fallen among the rocks, and the dark scar made in the embers of their fire.
Their fire! His fire and Jane’s—burned out to ashes.
He put the flask back in its place and began slowly to pace the floor, his hands behind his back, his head bent forward, his eyes peering somberly. He stopped in his walk and put a lump of coal into the grate. He was dead tired and his muscles ached as though with a cold. In the next room his bed invited him, but he did not undress, for he knew that if he went to bed it would only be to lie and gaze at the gray patch of light where the window was. He had done that before and the memory of the dull ache in his body during the long night when he had suffered came to him and overpowered him. He had that pain now—coming slowly, as it had sometimes done before when he had been working on his nerve. It didn’t grip him as once it had done, with its clutch of fire, driving everything else from his thoughts. But he was conscious that the craving was still there, and he knew that the thing he wanted was the panacea for the thoughts that oppressed him. By its means all the aches of his body would be cured and the pain of his thoughts. Yes! He stopped at the table and took up a cigarette. But there was one thing in him, one thing more important than physical pain, than physical exhaustion or singing nerves, one small celestial spark that he had kindled, fostered, and tended which had warmed and comforted his entire being—the glow of his returning self-respect; and this thing he knew, if those physical pangs were cured, would die.
He took up his measured tread of the floor, counting his footsteps from window to door and back again, watching the patterns in the rug and picking out the figures upon which he was to put his feet. Once or twice his footsteps led him as though unconsciously to the cabinet in the corner, where he stopped with a short laugh. He had forgotten that there was no panacea there. Later on he rang the bell for Barker, only to remember that the man had gone away for the night. He wanted some one to talk to—some one—any one who could make him forget. What was the use? What did it matter to any one but himself if he forgot or not? What was he fighting for? For himself? Yesterday and the days before he had been fighting for Jane, fighting gladly—downtown, in his clubs, at people’s houses, in the Enemy’s country, where the Enemy was to be found at every corner, at his very elbow, because he knew that nothing could avail against his purpose to win Jane back to him.
Now he had no such purpose. Jane had turned from him because some one had lied about him, turned away and left him here alone in the dark with this hideous thing that was rising up in him and would not let him think.
He went to the table and filled a pipe with trembling fingers. A terror oppressed him, the imminence of a danger. It was the horror of being alone, alone in the room where this thing was. He knew it well. It had been here before and it had conquered him. It lurked in the dark corners and grinned from his bookshelves and laughed in the crackling of his fire. “Come,” he could hear it say, “don’t you remember old Omar?