Monsieur L'Ame du Vin, that celebrated conductor, has just slid into his seat. He smirks at his players, gives an intelligent glance at the first violin, and taps upon the desk.
Three beats of the baton, a raised left hand, and once more the oft repeated overture to the Dance of Death commences, with the Fiend Alcohol beating time.
Ingworth came back soon. There was a slight bruise upon his upper lip, but that was all.
The two men—it was to be the last time in lives which had so strangely crossed—were friends in a sense that they had never been before. Both of them looked back upon that afternoon during the immediate days to come with regret and sorrow. Each remembered it differently, according to the depth of individual temperament. But it was remembered, as an hour when strife and turmoil had ceased; when, trembling on the brink of unforeseen events to come, there was pause and friendship, when the good in both of them rose to the surface for a little space and was observed of both.
"Now, Dicker, you just watch. They'll all be here soon for their afternoon drink—the local bloods, I mean. It's their substitute for afternoon tea, don't you know. They sit here talking about nothing to friends who have devoted their lives to the subject. Watch it for your work. You'll learn a lot. That must have been the way in which Flaubert got his stuff for 'Madame Bovary.'"
Something of the artist's fire animated the lad. He was no artist. He hadn't read "Madame Bovary," and it wouldn't have interested him if he had. But the plan appealed to him. It fitted in with his method of life. It was getting something for nothing. Yet he realised, to give him his due, a little more than this. He was sitting at the feet of his Master.
But as it happened, on that afternoon the local bloods were otherwise employed, for at any rate they made no appearance.
Lothian felt at ease. He had one or two more pegs. He had been so comparatively abstemious since his accident and under the regime of Dr. Morton Sims, that what he took now had only a tranquillising and pleasantly narcotic influence.
The nervous irritation of an hour before which had made him strike his friend, the depression and hollow misery which succeeded it, the few minutes of lyrical exaltation as he thought of Rita Wallace, all these were merged in a sense of bien être and drowsiness.
He enjoyed an unaccustomed and languid repletion in his mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for a time.