It always seemed to Sidney a miracle that a servant came to the door at that very moment.
"A telephone for you, Mr. Billop; we're holding the wire."
"You'll have to excuse me for a minute, Belhaven." Sidney flushed with relief; even ten minutes' respite would be a godsend, for he was entirely at loss what to say to his interrogator.
In fact he was thinking, with an inward shudder, of the terrible face of the man as he made his way across the wide hall and down a little entry to the telephone room. A black-uniformed, white-capped maid was at the 'phone but Sidney was too confused to even give her a languishing glance as he took the receiver. It was a call from his mother and she wanted him home at once; the storm was frightful and increasing so that she feared he would be in danger on his way home. Besides, the weather-man had threatened a blizzard and he knew he was subject to tonsilitis,—Sidney, not the weather-man, she said,—and if dinner happened to be over he must come at once; she had sent a taxicab.
"Make any excuse," she 'phoned wildly. "Come—it's a blizzard and you always take cold when you get your feet wet. I had overshoes put in the cab."
He made a reassuring reply, hung up the receiver and looked around. The little room was empty; beyond, the hall was empty too; only a discreet footman sat by the front door, and Sidney remembered that, for some providential reason, he had left his coat and hat in the hall instead of going up to the dressing-room. For a moment he hesitated, his face deeply flushed, then the recollection of the figure waiting in the den, of that inexorable look in Belhaven's eyes, decided his wavering mood. He went quietly out, almost on tiptoe; he passed the conservatory and the drawing-room door unobserved, and in another moment the footman had him into his fur coat and the taxi was waiting at the terrace step. Sidney scribbled a line on a card for Mrs. Astry,—he had been summoned home by his mother, he said,—and then he gave the man a dollar, for he was really grateful, and went out rather hurriedly and got into the cab. But he did not breathe freely until it was speeding swiftly down-hill toward the city with the snow white on the glass of the windows and the wind driving past like a hurricane.
Belhaven waited a long time. The cowardly absurdity of Billop's attitude had not affected him as it would have done at another time. Where he would only have felt contempt, he was experiencing a feverish rage; he longed to take the fool, as he called him, and shut his mouth forever. Billop's very cowardice, his patent desire to escape even for a moment, only added fuel to the other man's wrath. What right had this idiot to thrust himself into a situation so delicate and so painful, to tattle of it to the world for his own amusement?
Belhaven walked restlessly about the room, storming against the fate that permitted such imbeciles a place in civilized communities, and it was not until the clock on the mantel suddenly chimed the hour that he awoke to the possibility that "the idiot" had decamped. After a moment of angry amazement he went to the door and summoned the same servant who had delivered the telephone call. It happened that the man had seen Sidney's abrupt departure, and Belhaven had the mortification of finding that his quarry had slipped through his fingers. That flight was an admission of guilt would amount to nothing with a man like Sidney Billop, and Belhaven realized that he would probably evade another climax, or meet it only under his mother's sheltering wing, and he experienced a maddened feeling of defeat. For the time, at least, "the idiot" had got the better of him.
At every point, then, he was facing defeat and mortification. He had been insulted by Charter, tortured by Astry, and yet was unable to defend himself without tearing open the gaping seams of the scandal. For he was trapped, crucified, made helpless by his own act. He felt that Rachel must despise him, that she must remember that his acceptance of her sacrifice had caused the whole miserable situation, that had he faced Astry like a man and taken his punishment, he would have been delivered from the shackles that bound him. If he had died by Astry's hand, he would, at least, have died a free man; now he could turn neither to the right nor to the left, and he felt that the immeasurable distance between Rachel and himself could never be spanned,—she would always regard him as her sister's discarded lover, as the poltroon who refused to face her sister's husband. Even a kind glance, a reassuring word, a smile from her, meant nothing but pity, pity for the weakness that had cowed him in horror of his own moral obliquity. The terrible clarity of this new mental vision showed him the lasting shame of his punishment, the disgrace of cowardice!
In crossing the hall he heard the sound of voices in the drawing-room and Pamela's light touch on the piano. Some one laughed gayly and the parrot in the conservatory suddenly screamed out its mocking cry of "Eva, Eva!" He had again the feeling of being outside of it all, of viewing it with the detachment of a stranger, and even recalled that moment, earlier in the evening, when he had thought that things would look thus to his disembodied spirit. His intimacy with the place, the people, the artificial life they led, seemed to have dissolved; he no longer belonged to them, or if he did, he was so greatly changed that, if they recognized him at all, they would disown him. He had forfeited his place among them, he had forfeited his right to a place among men; he was a coward! The thought stung him so keenly that he shrank, naturally and unconsciously, from that familiar scene in the drawing-room; he could not force himself to go in and see Pamela lightly strumming out a popular tune and Sedley playing bridge! He turned, instead, and unnoticed except by one of the servants, went on into the library. As he passed through the room, he glanced around at the warm, tinted walls, the richly lined book-shelves, the big table with its study lamp, the fire on the hearth; and the comfort and the luxury of it touched some incoherent consciousness of home. He sighed, and going to the fire, tore up and burned the scurrilous paper that Astry had given him, watching it until the last charred fragment fell into a blackened cinder. Then he opened one of the long, French windows and, closing it carefully behind him, went out on the terrace.