“Really,” he thought to himself, “it must have been something in me, a need of an outward inspiration that blinded me and cloaked her with illusions,—I myself in love with what I profoundly longed for and created in my need!”
But if Louise had no longer power to wound him on his own account, she brought back to him, with overwhelming sadness, the memory of Inga, and the ceaseless, burning need that all the deeper sources of his nature had of her sustaining presence. Of those who were at the table, he knew almost all, men and women of a fashionable set, several defiant of social censure, others too firmly entrenched to be judged by their companions. Every one at the table must have known what Louise Bowden was, what she had done and would dare to do. This then was respectability—of an extreme cast, yet social respectability! Almost was he inclined toward Inga’s scorn of convention and defiance of society, of complete denial of the world to judge them with the same standards with which it accepted those who bent towards its outward forms.
“A little glass of Amontillado with the oysters,” said “the baron,” “just to flavor them!”
He looked down, his fingers closed over the slender neck of his glass that held the first golden stream back to forgetfulness. He hesitated, shrugged his shoulders, and drank.
When he had groped his way down the hall and found with difficulty his door, one thing was clear to him even in the swirling, happy numbness of his brain. He knew now the secret of “the baron’s” strange existence, of his brilliant monthly recrudescence and the long days of subsequent denial. He knew now what the sheets of paper covered with ordered figures meant, and the explanation or the curious, whirring noises which often at the dead of night came from behind the door of Mr. Cornelius. “The baron” was still, as he had always been, a blind, insensate gambler, passionately absorbed in the quest of that touchstone of gamblers, the pursuit of the infallible system which once attained held the alchemy of success. From Delmonico’s they had gone to a select gambling-house in the Forties, where the Comte de Retz was as punctual as the calendar, and where he returned, night after night, until the quick and inevitable night when ill luck overwhelmed his meager capital—a meager moment of dramatic sensations, and then the inevitable return to the bleak existence in the lone studio lit by the flare of an arc-light.
Dangerfield came into his room, threw on the single gold-shaded table-lamp and sat down beyond the circle of light that cut the shadows of the studio. He felt painfully, treacherously awake, and he knew that, for the black balance of the night, sleep would not come until he fell over with physical fatigue at the mingling of the dawn. His surroundings, which lately had come into his intimacy, rousing the pleasant sense of the harmonious, now were empty and hostile. The living touch was absent, in the absence of Inga, just as, in the early days of his apprenticeship, he had felt in his muddy attempts at painting, the absence of the illuminating sense of atmosphere.
How a human touch colors the inanimate world with the communicated warmth of its enchantment! Yes; her absence had changed all. It was no longer the spot for dreams he had called it—each tapestry chair and table no longer wrapped around with the memory of her, of returning hope and struggling ambition—but a cold and deserted thing, which claimed him, too, cold and deserted. He loved her beyond what he had thought possible, beyond what he had believed lay in him to love, not simply as a part, though the vital element in his life, but as the whole world, the window through which all sensations must come to him. He had felt this realization in the tricked-out gaiety of the restaurant, in the sudden lightening of his heart as he had stood behind Mr. Cornelius, looking up at the ghost of the fatal romance which had sent him into exile, comprehending the man who, over the flight of years, could still pronounce that the past had been worth all that had been and was to come. He had felt it in his revolt against all he had been born to, struggled against, and lived with in compromise. He felt it now in his isolation and exile, so overwhelmingly that he sprang up and flung on all the lights, terrified at the reality of his utter loneliness, staring at his reflection in the mirror as though at some uncomprehended stranger. The need in him now was as fierce as the horror of the isolation he had imposed on himself—which he could break with a word, which depended only on him.
After all, why not? What she had pronounced as her theory of life and love he had himself a hundred times acclaimed in conversation, heard dozens of others maintain. His brain was soaring on fiery wings with the divine frenzy of genius, which lifts itself up with pinions which consume themselves. He was drunk with the intoxication of the old world and with other days. There was something superb in it, something heroically mad—not the sordid drunkenness of small beer. He felt among the privileged of the earth. He had a cruel sense of power, the right to thrust aside petty plebeian scruples, to take what he needed. He was filled with the rage of living, desiring, conquering, to make an end of depression and weakness. Why should he stand on a scruple—that was hardly a scruple, a sentimental yielding to the conventions of right and wrong of a society of surface morality against which he had himself rebelled. He had but to cross the hall and knock, to swim back into the stream of youth and ambition. He pressed his hands to his hot temples, took a short fierce breath and said to himself:
“Will I do it? Now?”