With a burst of uncontrollable despair, he snatched the rake from the hand of the croupier, who had just swept away his money, and with both hands snapped it in two; a murmur followed this act of violence, which only seemed preparatory to something worse; but he glared round upon the players with such a look of mad fury that they were awe-stricken.
Instead of any further violence, however, he broke out into a wild hysterical laugh, which made their blood run cold, and staggered out of the house.
In that moment which had preceded his wild laugh, a vision of his young wife and child destitute,—starving,—thinned with want and sickness, had appeared to him, and, as in a flash, revealed to him the hideous extent of his ruin.
Beggared, dishonoured, stained with a profitless crime, nought remained for him but death; and in death he resolved to still the throbbing of his agony.
As he stumbled into Leicester Square, he ran up against one of those unfortunate women, who, flaunting in satin and faded frippery, make the streets hideous after sunset.
"Now then, my dear, are you going to rush into my arms without an invitation?
'Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won?'"
The fumes of bad wine poisoned the breath of the speaker, but the tones struck so strangely upon Cecil's ears, that they arrested him even on the path of death.
He seized her by the wrist, and dragged her under a lamp-post. As the light fell upon both their faces, and he recognised in the wretched woman arrayed in the garb of shame, the Hester Mason whom he had known so prosperous and ambitious—and, as she recognised in the emaciated haggard wreck before her, the only man she had ever loved, he gasped with inexpressible emotion, she wept with intense shame.
Not a word passed between them. With a suffocating sense of bitter humiliation, she wrested herself from his grasp, and darted down Cranbourne Alley. He put his hand to his brow, as if to repress its throbbing, and slowly walked on.