“Were you sane, you infernal fool—you two infernal fools—when you got into this car with the man whom you have outraged?� shrieked Maudslay-Berrish. “Haven’t you dragged my good name in the mud, made me a by-word and a laughing-stock, a mockery even to myself—even to myself, in the last five years! Why, you d—— ——� (he called Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish an unlovely name) “my very servants sneer at me, the people at the theater grin when I come loafin’ round behind the scenes. They’re quite aware of what I’ve swallowed without gaggin’. They know I’ve lived on your money when I’d got through my own, quite fly as to where most of it came from�—he pointed a shaking finger at the stricken Teddy—“and as downy as you pleased. Teddy, old chap, I’ve called that blue-gilled funker there, and half a dozen like him. Well, Teddy, old chap, say your prayers quick, for you’re going to die suddenly!�
The woman and her lover knew now what their late dupe and butt meant to do. He had the ripping cord half-hitched about his left wrist—the ripping cord, a sharp tug at which will, when a balloon is dangerously dragged during a descent, take an entire panel out of the envelope in two seconds, immediately deflating the bag. And in his right hand Maudslay-Berrish manipulated a neat little revolver.
Certainly he played the star part in the drama, and held the audience breathless. Half of the audience, that is, for Teddy, old chap, was at his prayers. Down on his knees at the bottom of the car, his gloved hands rigidly clasped, his handsome, weak face turned up to the sustaining ball of gas that hovered in its imprisoning net above, between him and the Illimitable Void, he cowered and slavered. In pleading for Heaven’s mercy upon a miserable sinner, he set forth that his Eve had tempted him; he asked for time to make up, another chance, a year, six months, a week only of sweet life. Hearing him, Eve herself grew sick with contempt of his infinite littleness, and even Maudslay-Berrish half turned away his eyes.
“Why don’t you pray?� he said, sneeringly, to his wife. “Why don’t you grovel like that thing you have kissed?�
Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion, would have held an audience mute and breathless by the quiet scorn conveyed in Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish’s look and tone.
“I dare say when you have done what you are going to do, I shall wake up in Hell,� she said; “and I believe I shall have earned it!�
Teddy, still spinning out the smeared records of his Past, was now prostrate and bathed in tears.
“If I doubted the existence of such a place before, I do not now. For I have loved that man�—she bit her white underlip sharply—“and I have seen and heard him. Henceforth there can be nothing worse to bear, here or hereafter. Why do you delay? Pull the cord and have done with it, or I shall say you are afraid!�
The Beata came sailing gently down upon a delightful green expanse of turf at Aldershot—the tennis ground, in fact, of a dandy Cavalry Regiment. The anchor dropped and caught in a pollard oak; a dozen delightfully pink lieutenants in correct flannels assisted the handsome Miss Fennis, of the West End theaters, to alight from the basket. Maudslay-Berrish, calm and imperturbable as usual, followed. In the midst of congratulations and offers of luncheon, a lieutenant exclaimed: