The perspiration dripped from Anthony's countenance, wet the clenched palms of his hands. He walked on and on, through streets brilliantly lighted and streets dark; streets crowded with men in evening clothes, loafing with cigarettes by illuminated playbills, streets empty, silent save for the echo of his hurried, shambling footsteps. Eliza was lost, out there somewhere in the night; he must find her, bring her back: but he couldn't find her, nor bring her back—she was dead. He stopped to reconsider dully that idea. A row of surprisingly white marble steps, of closed doors, blank windows, confronted him. “This is where I retire,” Thomas Meredith declared. Anthony wondered what the fellow was buzzing about? why should he wait for him, Anthony Ball, at “McCanns”?
He considered with a troubled brow a world empty of Eliza; it wasn't possible, no such foolish world could exist for a moment. Who had dared to rob him? In a methodical voice he cursed all the holy, all the august, all the reverent names he could call to mind. Then again he hurried on, leaving standing a ridiculous figure who shouted an incomprehensible sentence.
He passed through an unsubstantial city of shadows, of sudden, clangoring sounds, of the blur of lights swaying in strings above his head, of unsteady luminous bubbles floating before him through ravines of gloom; bells rang loud and threatening, throats of brass bellowed. His head began to throb with a sudden pain, and the pain printed clearly on the bright suffering of his mind a stooping, dusty figure; leaden eyes, a grey face, peered into his own; slack lips mumbled the story of a boy dead long ago—Eliza, Eliza was dead—and of a red necktie, a Sunday suit; a fearful figure, a fearful story, from the low mutter of which he precipitantly fled. Other faces crowded his brain—Ellie with her cool, understanding look, his mother, his father frowning at him in assumed severity; he saw Mrs. Dreen, palely sweet in a starlit gloom. Then panic swept over him as he realized that he was unable, in a sudden freak of memory, to summon into that intimate gallery the countenance of Eliza. It was as though in disappearing from the corporeal world she had also vanished from the realm of his thoughts, of his longing. He paused, driving his nails into his palms, knotting his brow, in an agony of effort to visualize her. In vain. “I can't remember her,” he told an indistinct human form before him. “I can't remember her.”
A voice answered him, thin and surprisingly bitter. “When you are sober you will stop trying.”
And then he saw her once more, so vivid, so near, that he gave a sobbing exclamation of relief. “Don't,” he whispered, “not... lose again—” He forgot for the moment that she was dead, and put out a hand to touch her. Thin air. Then he recalled. He commenced his direct, aimless course, but a staggering weariness overcame him, the toylike progress grew slower, there were interruptions, convulsive starts.
LIII
AT the same time the haze lightened about him: he saw clearly his surroundings, the black, glittering windows of stores, the gleaming rails which bound the stone street. His hat was gone and he had long before lost the bundle that contained his linen. But the loss was of small moment now—he had money, a pocketful of it, and forty-seven thousand dollars waiting in Ellerton: his father was a scrupulous, truthful and exact man.
Eliza and he would have been immediately married, gone to a little green village, under a red mountain; Eliza would have worn the most beautiful dresses made by a parrot; but that, he recognized shrewdly, was an idiotic fancy—birds didn't make dresses. And now she was dead.