"Some ass has been telling her things," he muttered to himself.
And then he thought of Mrs. Bellenden's appearance that night, in a gown of gold tissue, and a diamond tiara. She had been too insolently splendid in her overweening beauty, too tremendous, too suggestive of Cleopatra at Actium, a woman who lived upon the ruin of men.
What wife, who cared for her husband, could help being angry if she saw him near such a creature?
And he had been near her all the night. He had whispered with her in corners, hung over her perfumed shoulders, followed her close as her shadow, sat with her in a nest of tropical flowers in the balcony, instead of moving about among his guests.
He had taken her down to the supper-room, first among the first, neglecting duchesses and a princess of the blood royal for her sake. No doubt that malicious little wretch Susan Amphlett had been watching him, and had reported all his misdoings to Vera.
"What does it matter?" he said to himself. "My life was growing unbearable. The gloom was closing round me like a funeral pall. Kate was my only refuge. I have never been in love with her; but she stops me from thinking."
That was the secret. Mrs. Bellenden had been his Nepenthe, when the common round of pleasures had lost their power to make him forget.
Mrs. Bellenden was like strong drink, like opium or hashish. She killed thought. She filled the vacant spaces in his life—the Stygian swamps where black thoughts wandered in space, like angry devils. Her exactions, her quarrels, their partings and reunions, the agitations and turmoil of her existence, had filled his life. When he banged the hall door of the bijou house in Brown Street behind him after one of their stormy farewells he knew that he would go back to her in a week. He tramped the adjacent Park across and across, along and along, in a fury, and thanked God that he had done with "that harpy"; but he knew that he would have to go back to the harpy, to be reconciled again, with oaths and kisses and tears, and to quarrel again, and to obey her orders, and go here or there as she made him. The most degrading slavery to a wicked woman was better than the great silent house and the horror that inhabited it.