But Dick Lancaster, who, from the sofa beyond the curtains, had heard all of this conversation, did not dream of pleasant things that night. In fact, he spent a white night. Like a flood the horrors of self-revelation had come upon him at sound of those arguments and dissections; he saw himself as he was, compared with what he had been; he shuddered and shivered in the grip of remorse.
In the white light of shame he saw whither the wish to taste of life had led him; he realized that something of that hopeless corruption that Stanley had spoken of was already etched into his conscience. Oh, the terrible temptation of all those shibboleths, that told us that we must live while we may! He felt, now that he had seen how deep was the abyss below him, that his feet were long since on the decline, and that from a shy attempt at worldliness he had gone on to what, to his suddenly re-awakened conscience, constituted dissoluteness.
To the man of the world, perhaps, his slight defections from the puritanic code would have seemed ridiculously vague. But, he repeated to himself with quickened anguish, if he began to consider things from the standpoint of the world, he was utterly lost; he would soon be like those others.
He got up and opened the window of his bed-room. Below him was the hum of the cable; a dense mist obscured the electric lights, and the town seemed reeking with a white sweat. He felt as if he were a prisoner. He began to feel a loathing for this town that had made him dispise himself so much. The roar of it sounded like a wild animal's.
Then a breeze came and swept the mist away, and left the streets shining with silvery moisture. Lights crept out of the darkness, and the veil passed from the stars. The wild animal seemed to be smiling. But the watcher at the window merely shrank back a little, closing the window. Fascinating, as a serpent; poisonous as a cobra! The glitter and glamour of society; the devil-may-care fascinations of Bohemia; they had lured him to such agony as this!
Such agony? What, you ask, had this young man to be in agony about? He was a very nice young man—all the world would have told you that! Ah, but was there never a moment in your lives, my dear fellow-sinners—you men and women of the world—when it came to your conscience like a sword-thrust, that the beautiful bloom of your youth and innocence was gone from you forever and that ever afterward there would be a bitter memory or a bitterer forgetfulness? And was that not agony? Ah, we all hold the masks up before our faces, but sometimes our arms tire, and they slip down, and then how haggard we look! Perhaps, if we had listened to our consciences when they were quicker, we would not have those lines of care upon our faces now. You say you have a complexion and a conscience as clear as the dew? Ah, well, then I am not addressing you, of course. But how about your neighbors? Ah, you admit—? Well, then we will each of us moralize about our neighbor. It is so much pleasanter, so much more diverting!
[CHAPTER X]
With the coming of morning, Lancaster shook himself out of his painful rêveries, and decided that he must escape from this metropolitan prison, if for ever so short a time. He would go out into the country, home. He would go where the air was pure, and all life was not tainted. He walked to a telegraph office and sent a dispatch to his mother, telling of his coming.
Then he went for a walk in the park. Now that he had made up his mind to get out of this choking dungeon for a while he felt suddenly buoyant, refreshed. He tried to forget Stanley and the Imperial Theatre, and all other unpleasant memories of that sort. Some of the park policemen concluded that this was a young man who was feeling very cheerful indeed—else, why such fervid whistling?