The most poignant and almost physical sorrow returned to him. His heart seemed to ache like a tooth. Yet it wasn't dull, hopeless depression. It was, he thought, a high tragic sorrow ennobling in its strength; a sorrow such as only the supreme soul-wounded artists of the world could know—had known.
"She was for me!" his heart cried out. "Ah, if only I had met her first!" Yes! he was fain of all the tragic sorrows of the Great Ones to whom he was brother, of whose blood he was.
In a single flash of time—as the drowning man is said to experience all the events of his life at the penultimate moment of dissolution—he felt that he knew the secrets of all sorrow, the pangs of all tragedy.
The inevitable thought of his wife passed like a blur across the fire-lit heights of his false agony.
"I cannot love her," he said in his mind. "I have never loved her. I have been blind until this moment." A tear of sentiment welled into his eye at the thought of poor Mary, bereft of his love. "How sad life was!"
Nearly every man, at some time or other, has found a faint reflection of this black thought assail him and has put it from him with a prayer and the "vade retro Sathanas."
Few men would have chosen their present wives if they had met—let us assume—fifty other women before they married. And when the ordinary, normal, decent man meets a woman better, clever, more desirable than the one he has, it is perfectly natural that he should admire her. He would be insensible if he did not. But with the normal man it stops there. He is obliged to be satisfied with his own wife. The chaos that riotous and unbalanced minds desire has not come yet. And if a man says that he cannot love a wife who is virtuous and good, then Satan is in him.
"I cannot love her," Lothian thought of his wife, and in the surveyal of this fine brain and noble mind poisoned by alcohol it is proper to remember that two hours before he could not have thought this thing. It would have been utterly impossible.
Was it then the few recent administrations of poison that had changed him so terribly, brought him to this?
The Fiend Alcohol has a myriad dominations. A lad from the University gets drunk in honour on boat-race night—for the first time in his life—and tries to fight with a policeman. But he is only temporarily insane, becomes ashamed and wiser in the morning, and never does such a thing again.