Later somebody offered a toast to Desboro, but when they looked around for him in the uproar, glasses aloft, he had disappeared.
[CHAPTER VII]
There was no acknowledgment of his note to Jacqueline the day following; none the next day, or the next. It was only when telephoning to Silverwood he learned by chance from Mrs. Quant that Jacqueline had been at the house every day as usual, busy in the armoury with the work that took her there.
He had fully expected that she would send a substitute; had assumed that she would not wish to return and take the chance of his being there.
What she had thought of his note to her, what she might be thinking of him, had made him so miserable that even the unwisdom of excess could not dull the pain of it or subdue the restless passion ever menacing him with a shameful repudiation of the words he had written her. He had fought one weakness with another, and there was no strength in him now. He knew it, but stood on guard.
For he knew, too, in his heart that he had nothing to offer her except a sentiment which, in the history of man, has never been anything except temporary. With it, of course, and part of it, was a gentler inclination—love, probably, of one sort or another—with it went also genuine admiration and intellectual interest, and sympathy, and tenderness of some unanalysed kind.
But he knew that he had no intention of marrying anybody—never, at least, of marrying out of his own social environment. That he understood fully; had wit and honesty enough to admit to himself. And so there was no way—nothing, now, anyway. He had settled that definitely—settled it for her and for himself, unrequested; settled, in fact, everything except how to escape the aftermath of restless pain for which there seemed to be no remedy so far—not even the professional services of old Doctor Time. However, it had been only three days—three sedative pills from the old gentleman's inexhaustible supply. It is the regularity of taking it, more than the medicine itself which cures.
On the fourth day, he emerged from the unhappy seclusion of his rooms and ventured into the Olympian Club, where he deliberately attempted to anæsthetise his badly battered senses. But he couldn't. Cairns found him there, sitting alone in the library—it was not an intellectual club—and saw what Desboro had been doing to himself by the white tensity of his features.