To many visitors the Chamber of Horrors is all its name signifies. But it is a place of pleasure nevertheless. The skin creeps but the sensation is pleasant. It provides a thrill like a switchback railway. But it is not a place that artists and imaginative people can enter and easily forget. It epitomises the wages of sin. It ought to be a great educational force. Young criminals should be taken there between stern guardians, to learn by concrete evidence which would appeal to them as no books or sermons could ever do, the Nemesis that waits upon unrepentant ways.
The man and the girl who had just entered were both in a state of nervous tension. They were physically exhausted, one by fierce indulgence in poison, the other by three weeks of light and feverish pleasure.
And more than this.
Each, in several degree, knew that they were doing wrong, that they had progressed far down the primrose path led by the false flute-players.
"I couldn't have conceived it was so, so unnerving, Gilbert," Rita said, shrinking close to him.
"It is pretty beastly," Lothian answered. "It's simply a dictionary of crime though, that's all—rather too well illustrated."
"I don't want to know of these horrors. One sees them in the papers, but it means little or nothing. How dreadful life is though, under the surface!"
Gilbert felt a sudden pang of pity for her, so young and fair, so frightened now.—Ah! he knew well how dreadful life was—under the surface!
For a moment, in that tomb-like place a vision came to him, sunlit and splendid, calm and beautiful.
He saw his life as it might be—as doubtless God meant it to be, a favoured, fortunate and happy life, for God does not, in His inscrutable wisdom chastise all men. Well-to-do, brilliant of mind, with trained capacity to exact every drop of noble joy from life; blessed with a sweet and beautiful woman to watch over him and complement him; did ever a man have a fairer prospect, a luckier chance?