He, too, would go to the tavern of The Golden Sun.
He turned to his left as he stepped off the bridge, and kept by the river-wall.
There came to him now and then through the clammy darkness ahead the sound of the girl’s coughing. This woman was Hélène, the fragile beauty whom Aubrey had filched from her easy-going husband, a young doctor of the commercial quarter across the river. In the letter she had written to bid the honest commonplace fellow farewell (Aubrey had told it at a tavern merry-making amidst the sly laughter of his fellows) she had complained that he had no romance, that the very soles of his thick and clumsy boots were like his own solid soul, an offence to her sense of the subtleties—that she must out into the world to seek romance and the colour of life. The blow had fallen out of a serene day in the face of the poor fellow, and it was matter of common report that he had reeled from it—he, being unpoetical and unappreciative of the picturesque glamour of wickedness, had not even appreciated that he was party to a romance—had taken instead to avoiding his fellows and was walking with Shame—furtively, unheroically. Paris had laughed. And the girl——
She was getting her fill of crude adventure now....
Out of the reek there came again to Noll the pitiful cough. The footsteps stopped for awhile. A quickly suppressed sob. Again footsteps.
In the sombre gliding river below, the green lights of vaguely looming blacknesses that were canal-boats, splashed emerald flames in the inky flood. Loomed now across the waters the massive solidity of the twin-towered cathedral, black against the black night; and beyond and low down upon the pitchy tide the pale lights that burn all night in the house of the dishonoured dead gleamed through the window-slats of the Morgue.
Noll, hearing the cough again, roused to the sound that the others had left the riverside. He crossed the drenched quays, and leaving the river behind him, struck into a narrow street that was possessed by the spectral wraithes flung down the grimy old walls by the ghostly lamps that hung thereon. Along the gloomy thoroughfare the chill airs, from the river hard by, set the lamp’s flame flickering, and sent dusky shadows moving stealthily out of dingy doorways and black corners, shadows that stealthily stole back again. And amidst the silent spectres, flecked by the down-flung light of the creaking wall-lamps, flitted the figures of the man and woman; and back from amongst the ghostly wraithes came the pitiful harsh cough.
Their shadowy figures turned into the squalid street that is called the Rue Galande; and Noll closely followed them, they came to a halt before the low arch of a doorway and stepped out of sight.
When Noll reached the arch, the red maw of which yawned into the sordid street, he saw by the legend written upon the glass of the battered gas-lamp which hung awry overhead that he was at the threshold of the tavern of The Golden Sun. Across the dark stretch of rudely paved courtyard beyond, the two figures were passing blackly under the yellow flood of a gas-lamp, the restless flame of which showed a flight of steps leading underground. The twain descended into the gloom of the passage and were swallowed in the cellars from which came a gust of song and the sound of music as the doors opened and shut upon them.
Noll descended the steps, pushed open the doors at the bottom, and stepped into the tavern of The Golden Sun.