Deep down among the strong foundations the enemy was at work. The spire—the "Central-one"—which sprang up towards Heaven was deeply undermined. Still—save to the eyes of experts—its glory rose unimpaired. But it was but a lovely shell with no longer any grip upon its base of weakened Will. And the bells in the wind-swept height of the Tower no longer rang truly. On red dawns or on pearl-grey evenings the message they sent over the country-side was beginning to be false. There was no peace when they tolled the Angelus.
In oriel or great rose-window the colour of the painted glass was growing dim. The clear colour was fading, though here and there it was shot with baleful fire which the Artist had never painted there,—like the blood-shot eyes of the man who drinks.
A miasmic mist had crept into the noble spaces of the aisles. The vast supporting pillars grew insubstantial and seemed to tremble as the vapour eddied round them. A black veil was quickly falling before the Figure above the Altar, and the seven dim lamps of the Sanctuary burned with green and flickering light.
The bells of a Great Mind's Message, which had been cast with so much silver in them, rang an increasing dissonance. The trumpets of the organ echoed with a harsh note in the far clerestory; the flutes were false, the dolce stop no longer sweet. The great pipes of the pedal organ muttered and stammered in their massive voices, as if dark advisers whispered in the ear of the musician who controlled them.
Lothian had passed from one great Palace of Drink. "Where shall I go?" he asked himself again, and immediately his eye fell upon another, the brilliant illumination upon the façade of a well-known "Theatre of Varieties."
His hot eye-balls drank in the flaring signs, and telegraphed both an impulse and a memory to his brain.
"Yes!" he said. "I will revisit the 'Kingdom.' There is still two thirds of an hour before the performance will be over. How well I used to know it! What a nightly haunt it used to be. Surely, even now, there will be some people I know there? . . . I'll go in and see!"
As Lothian turned in at the principal doors of the most celebrated Music Hall in the world, his pulses began to quicken.
—The huge foyer, the purple carpets, with their wreaths of laurel in a purple which was darker yet, the gleaming marble stairway, with its wide and noble sweep, how familiar all this dignified splendour was, he thought as he entered the second Palace of Drink which flung wide its doors to him this night.
A palace of drink and lust, vast and beautiful! for those who brought poisoned blood and vicious desires within its portals! Here, banished from the pagan groves and the sunlit temples of their ancient glory—banished also from the German pine-woods where Heine saw them in pallid life under the full moon—Venus, Bacchus and Silenus held their unholy court.