"To-night or never! To-night is the last night that I shall ever set foot in your house. I have registered a vow in heaven to that, and I will keep it."
So he did. He had good cause to remember that night.
Mrs. Laylor saw that he looked as though he intended to keep it, and as he had been fool enough to tell her so, she at once determined to fool him to her own profit. So she promised him that he should have his utmost desire, and upon that she ordered up another bottle of wine, urged him to drink and amuse himself with the young ladies, while she went up and "smoothed the way."
There is but little need of smoothing the way that leads nearly every young man, who visits such places, to destruction. But she had a way to smooth. It was her last chance with this victim, and she determined on profit and revenge.
In due time she came in, and reported favorably.
"The lady would see him, in consideration of his profession, upon one condition—that he would not seek to learn her name, or anything about her, and that he should not see her face."
What did he care for that, since he had already seen it, and it was daguerreotyped upon his heated imagination, so that he would know her whenever he should meet her afterwards in the street.
Let the curtain of night fall. The sun shone into an eastern window of No. — H——n street the next morning, while Otis still slept. Its bright rays awakened him to the startling consciousness of having over-slept himself after a night of debauch. How should he get away without being seen? The thought troubled him sorely. But he soon determined what he would do; he would steal the veil from the face of the sleeping beauty to hide his own, and then slip out by the basement door, perhaps unseen. What harm could it do to her, since he had seen and knew the face so well?
He dressed himself hurriedly, then gently drew the veil away, with a salvo to his conscience that he would not then see her face, he would look the other way. His conscience would have been more easy afterwards if he had kept that resolve. He could not. The glance at Athalia's beauty the night before had maddened him, and he turned, as he was going out of the door, to look back where she slept, and steal—"Thou shalt not steal"—he had forgotten that—steal one more glance. He did, but instead of the face of Athalia, he saw that of a common street-walker—a young harridan—and he rushed from the room with the full weight of a burning conscience for his folly, with a feeling of self-degradation at being victimized a second time by the same deceitful woman; hating himself and everybody else; dreading to meet any one he knew, and, finally, encountering in the basement hall, striving to get out in the same sly way, the very man whom he had first taken to task for visiting this den of infamy. What a recognition! Neither could speak, so intense was the thought in the mind of each that the other might ruin him by simply revealing the truth. Strange that neither thought how little the other would dare to speak, least it should be inquired, "How did you know he was there? Where was you?"
Otis said afterwards to an acquaintance of mine, a physician, whom he was obliged to consult in consequence of that sinful night, that he could not conceive any agony more intensely painful in this life than that which he endured the next Sabbath, when he arose in the pulpit and looked down upon the congregation, but saw nothing, could see nothing, but that one pair of eyes glaring upon him just as they did the morning he met them in the hall of that house where he had been so disgraced.