"I wasn't aware of the idolatry." Harry laughed a little—a distant laugh. "You are observant, Hugh."
"Oh, anybody can see it. I'd like to know how you do it. It was always so with you, even at college. You could do pretty much as you liked, and yet be popular, too. Why, there was never a jamboree complete without you and your violin at the head of the table."
"That is a long time ago," said Harry.
"More than four years. Four years and a month to-morrow, since that last evening of college. Yet I imagine it will be longer before we forget it! I think of it still, sometimes, in the night—" Hugh went on more slowly,—"that last dinner of The Saints, and poor Archie singing with that wobbly smilax wreath over one eye and the claret spilled down his shirt-front—then the sudden silence like a wet blanket! I can see him yet, when his head dropped. He seemed to shrivel right up in his chair. How horrible to die like that! I didn't touch a drink for a month afterward!" He shivered slightly, and walked to the window.
Harry did not speak. The words had torn the network of the past as sheet-lightning tears the summer dusk; had called up a ghost that he had labored hard to lay—a memory-specter of a select coterie whose wild days and nights had once revolved about him as its central sun. The sharp tragedy of that long-ago evening had been the awakening. The swift, appalling catastrophe had crashed into his career at the pivotal moment. It had shocked him from his orbit and set him to the right-about-face. And the moral bouleversement had carried him, in abrupt recoil, into the ministry.
An odd confusion blurred his vision. Perhaps to cover this, he crossed the room to a small private safe which stood open in the corner, in which he kept his tithes and his charities. When Hugh, shrugging his shoulders as if to dismiss the unwelcome picture he had painted, turned again, Harry was putting into it some papers from his pocket. Hugh saw the action; his eyes fastened on the safe avidly.
"I say," he said after a moment's pause, as Harry made to shut its door, "can you loan me another fifty? I'm flat on my uppers again, and the old man has been tight as nails with me since I came back. I'm sure to be able to return it with the rest, in a week or two."
Harry stretched his hand again toward the safe—then drew it back with compressed lips. He had met Hugh with persistent courtesy, and the other had found him sufficiently obliging with loans. Of late, however, his nerves had been on edge. The patent calculation of Hugh's course had sickened, and his flippant cynicism had jarred and disconcerted him. A growing sense of security, too, had made Hugh less circumspect. More than once during the past month Harry had seen him issue from the shadowed door whose upper panel held the little barred window—the door at which Doctor Moreau had entrance, though decent doors were closed in his face.
Hugh's lowered gaze saw the arrested movement and his cheek flushed.
"Oh, if it's inconvenient, I won't trouble you for the accommodation," he said. "I dare say I can raise it."