The streets were filled with flying equipages, and the mansions were ablaze, the sidewalks held few pedestrians, and as Leacraft sorrowfully moved through the stately purlieus, music swept out from open windows or swinging doors. Often he paused and watched the descending occupants of the carriages; they were entrancing women and peerless men, their laughter was silvery and undismayed, unchecked by tears. Could it be possible that these inner esoteric circles of London high life and unimaginable wealth indulged in revelry; could not the crash and fall of empires turn the votaries of gayety to soberer thoughts, or stifle the intoxicating voice of pleasure? Leacraft wondered, and the weariness of a great suspense weighed him down; the ingrained Puritanism of his nature raged against this heartlessness, this indecent bravado, a mockery of joy, where all should be shadowed with the sighs of penitence and supplication.
Leacraft was bitterly offended at this apparent heartlessness; it startled him beyond the limits of endurance; he looked for some representative of this foolish life, upon whom to turn with rebuke and denunciation. Leacraft wandered on in a disconsolate mood, and the growing indications, with the falling night, that the fashionable world of London was engaged, in a preconcerted way, to spend the last hours of its metropolitan sojourn in a spendthrift vortex of excitement and conviviality moved him to muttered objurgations. He had slipped past Hyde Park Corners, past the Apsley House, and had glided with hastening steps, as his passion of revolt, at this unseemly loss of self-respect, rose to a towering indignation, into Grosvenor Square. He stood facing the long facade, where in repetitive elegance, with columned porches and mansard roofs, and wall-like chimneys, the mansions of the very rich, illumined at all their windows, poured forth a torrent of light. Aggrieved and stupefied, he shot into Berkley Square, and still no interruption to the aspect of mad revelry. Could it be a frenzied spasm of indulgence, before separation forever from the bliss of the West End, that terrestrial paradise of swelldom and financial and social glory? He wondered. And thus wondering, he came to Devonshire House, fronting Piccadilly. The comfortable home, with its small brick work, peeking chimney pots, the low entablature and triple doors behind the iron gateway, and the unbroken watch of the woman-headed sphinxes, on either side of the elevated escutcheon of the Kingdom, was there, encompassed by its imprisoning walls—and here, too, the effrontery of lavish gayety assaulted his eyes. The gates were flung wide open, powdered footmen were ranged before the doors, arriving and departing carriages threaded Piccadilly with conscienceless celerity, music uttered its delicious melodies, and in them was no requiem note, no throb of sorrow, and the guests crowding into its dazzling halls seemed untouched by thoughts less careless than the joys of the fleeting moments, whose hurrying steps were bringing the dawn of disaster to England. Exasperated, Leacraft turned on his heel in disgust, and was going towards Leicester Square, when a sharp report somewhere on the side of the Geological Museum, and ahead of his position, startled him, and the next instant he saw a carriage, with prancing steeds, plunging down the street, the swaying figure of the driver denoting his complete loss of control, while on one side of the equipage, that side towards Leacraft, the pale face of a gentleman was seen, and beside him the distracted visage of an elderly lady. As the carriage approached Leacraft, it crossed the street, and the front wheels collided with the curbing. This administered a slight detention, and the struggling horses turned again to the opposite side of the thoroughfare. Quick to see his advantage, Leacraft sprang to the head of the nearer horse, and exerting all his strength, which was not inconsiderable, he succeeded in tripping the beast, and as it fell the traces holding its companion broke, and the freed creature raced away down the avenue. The driver leaped to the sidewalk and held the now imprisoned horse, which, starting to its feet, stood trembling beside him, while Leacraft hastened to the door of the vehicle to liberate its occupants.
He had already been forstalled by the gentleman himself, who pushed the door back as Leacraft reached it and stepped to the walk, followed instantly by the lady in much commotion and disorder. Their agitation was short lived, and succumbed to the exercise of their own self-control. It was the gentleman who first spoke: “I am under the deepest obligation to you, sir, for your quickness and your courage. You may readily have saved us from a miserable fate. And”—Leacraft interrupted: “You were going to some rendezvous of pleasure; this, sir, in my opinion, on the eve of the nation’s assassination deserved punishment.” The speech was crude, rude perhaps, and the bitter taunt smote the stranger like a physical blow. He recoiled from it as if the sting of a cowhide had crossed his face. His face itself was a study. He stared at Leacraft, and as the latter met his gaze unflinchingly the pale face, distinguished in outline, feature, and expression, flushed to the temples, while the eyes seated under bushy brows gazed at Leacraft with a peculiar earnestness, not relieved of the dangerous suggestion of a rising passion. His companion understood his excitement, she clutched his arm, and seemed to apprehend a physical outbreak. Then the mouth opened, and spoke, and the voice was unexpectedly calm, and the utterances measured: “We are under deep obligation to you sir, but it is difficult for me to restrain myself before the false statements you have ventured to make. Can you explain this insult?”
He moved nearer to Leacraft who did not budge, but inspired with an increasing vigor of disgust, and eager to summarily remonstrate at the seeming cruelty of the parade about him, its grotesque wickedness, said: “I do not wish to take advantage of the accidental relations which have thus unexpectedly thrown us together. But surely it is known among men, and known bitterly among Englishmen that the shadows of an awful twilight are falling about them, and the Nation’s Day is closing. At such a crisis can it be possible for men and women, calling themselves English, in whom the memory of English fame and English glory, is still a present pride, can it be possible that at this moment they still consort for amusement, for display, for the fugitive follies of mutual admiration? This aristocracy is the head and forefront of the nation, and it should now be bowed in penitence, in supplication, in the agony of self inquiry, and it stupifies me to find them gay, when the heart of England is breaking with grief.”
A curious metamorphosis worked in the lineaments of the gentleman he was addressing. The hard lines relaxed, and a wistful smile, that drew its occult meaning from the man’s interior sadness, stole softly over his face. He put out his hand, which Leacraft accepted, and he returned Leacraft’s pressure. There was an instant’s silence, and then the stranger spoke, still holding Leacraft’s hand, and retaining his undeviating inspection of Leacraft’s face, as if he would force upon himself the recognition of a friend.
“These are just words, sir,” he began: “but how much you misunderstand what is going on here. This apparent revelry is an effort to keep from swooning: it is the forced continuance of a life familiar to us, when that life is to be crushed into nothingness; it is the defiance of habit, the revolt against extinction, the mortal protest against the infamous tyranny of circumstances. It is a delirium of indulgence, to forget what is coming upon us; a moment’s arbitrary refusal to think of the future, a dance, in whose whirl we shall remit the impulses of suicide. It is unreasonable, but its monstrous unreasonableness to you sir, measures our appalling sense of the disaster we can not stop to think of, measures the intensity of the recoil from obliteration; like the dressed and garlanded victim of an Aztec immolation we taste again the festive sweets upon which perhaps our cloyed appetites are no longer to feed. We are the sufferers in this eviction; the greatest, the poor, the artisan, laborer, the vast mediocrity lose something, but it amounts to little more than the exchange of one station here, for another of the same sort somewhere else. In a material sense our loss is incalculable; half our riches disappears but with that loss goes social prestige, title, and the moral consciousness of elevation, the breath of our nostrils. I, sir, am ——.” Leacraft did not move; his astonishment was too sharply focussed upon all the astounding previous confession. “And,” continued the man, “the ruin of worldly fortune seems small, after all, compared with the sacrifice of that dignified and sheltered life, which moved serenely, with every accompaniment of joy, in these delightful abodes, and under the protecting aegis of an inexpressible separation from the rest of the world. But”—he seemed to wish to justify himself, somehow, as he noticed the still petrified stare of Leacraft—“we have not been neglectful of the matters of adjustment. Committees have been appointed, plans laid, funds appropriated, agents despatched, for the selection of our new homes, and though we take our flight with lopped wings, our plumage may in time resume its former beauty. Do not misunderstand us because of these assemblies. We too carry deeper than you the pain of an unutterable grief.”
He finished, and Leacraft drawn into a reverie over the singular confession, which was anything but reassuring, and partook, to his mind, of the dementia of the foolish victim of a depraved habit, was silent. He felt the imperious requirements of speech, but he could say nothing. He felt pity, he was not without sympathy, though perhaps in that matter, a certain savor of self denying control, and a practical judgment interfered with his approval of the hyperbole of the speaker. And, almost dreaming, he stood there while the stranger and his lady re-entered their carriage, to which the runaway horse had been reattached, and drove off. Leacraft watched them mechanically and then turned, walked down Piccadilly, crossed Green Park, and looked at Buckingham Palace. The huge structure was partially illuminated, and the square in front of it was filled with soldiers, many of whom were at rest around the Victoria Memorial. To an officer lounging near by, Leacraft said, “Can you tell me where the King is to-night?”
“He sleeps at St. Leonards in Shoreditch,” was the laconic reply.