"Why will you talk like an idiot?" she cried through the loud wind. "Be a man, Ivor, for once. Your own folly brought you to this, you know perfectly well. Try to use a little sense, a little manliness. Pick yourself out of the mud and make a better thing of life than you have ever done yet. Give up this miserable gambling, for your own sake, if not for mine. Square the man yourself. He can get nothing by breaking you. Who can get blood from a stone? What if you have to leave the Service? Use those muscles of yours to some purpose. Use your brains. You are not the idiot or the child you make yourself out. Think of those who depend upon you, and don't talk of being dependent on women. Don't for a moment suppose that I, or any woman of spirit, would dream of marrying a man who can't stand on his own foundation."
They were walking against the wind, fighting their way through the deserted gardens to shelter behind the bandstand. The storm was so wild that things displayed outside shops parallel to the gardens were swept away before there was time to take them in; china hung on the walls rattled, clashed, and even cracked; newspapers, cards, handkerchiefs and scarves, flew hither and thither across street and gardens; the sunshine left the mountains, and the sky darkened.
"I was an ass to think you would," he replied grimly, maddened by her scorn, and in spite of the beating wind on it his face was quite white; for he knew that of the spirits casting dice for his soul the black one had won. "But," he added, stopping to catch the scarf that flew from Agatha's hand as she tried to wind it round her neck—"but—— Hullo, here's de Konski!"
The Anarchist was sheltering from the storm inside a café, and came out on their approach in the first great drops of a pelting rainstorm. "Yes, here I am," he repeated, saying something to Agatha in a language that had no meaning for Ivor, to which she replied quickly in the same, stepping aside in the shelter while the Anarchist hailed and stopped a fiacre flying past to stables. Then she wished Ivor good-bye, offering her hand, which he either did not or would not see.
"Good-bye," he said, when de Konski was handing her into the carriage. As she got in, she looked out and saw him replace his hat in the buffeting wind. Then she drove to Rumpelmayer's, where Ermengarde was still waiting. She could not catch the expression of his face as she drove off, but fancied a softening in its sullen hardness, while Ivor, unable in the rain and wind to catch a full glance of her face, turned back into the café with a dreadful sickness of heart, feeling that he had parted once for all with the better influences and purer hopes of his life, and was thrown definitely back to such consolation as a dishonourable union offered. Nothing mattered now; a sort of reckless joy took hold of him at the thought, and he shook off the heart-sickness with a wild laugh.
"Let's have a bock," he cried gaily. "If we must go to the devil, let's go with a light heart."
"But why go to the devil at all?" de Konski asked, when the waiter brought the drink.
"Nowhere else to go to, old chap. Nobody else to so much as look at the likes of me. I ain't worth the snap of a finger. Lord bless you, de Konski, that young saint you just popped into the trap out of my contaminating company never cared a hang for me—no, not a twopenny damn, so she says, and now I'm down on my luck she won't—— O Lord! Well! who cares? Better fish in the sea than ever came out of it, eh?"
"That depends on your fishing. Sometimes you net one with gold in its mouth. Pity to let that kind go."
"I shall never net this one," he sighed, setting down the glass he had drained, and staring blankly at the table before him. "She never did and never could care for me," he repeated silently to himself. And all the malign enchantment of the morning rushed back in full force, now that, scorned and rejected of one, he felt free to surrender himself to the other. "But I'll do the square thing," he told himself. "I'll marry her, I'm blest if I won't. She shall have her chance at last, poor woman!"