A hideous dread seized and appalled him. In those brief hours he seemed to have lived a lifetime.
“Why did I not kill him?” he muttered, lifting his haggard young face up to the faint rose light that filtered through the curtains. “Kill him! aye, and in her arms—kill him and her too! Heaven!” a strange, hoarse laugh escaped him.
“I shall go mad if I stay here—under the same roof with them.”
He began to move about confusedly, putting things together, and tossing his clothes into his portmanteau. He was possessed but by one idea—to leave a place made hateful by this discovery, to get away from these men and women, with their jeering tongues and malicious smiles, who all guessed or knew of his disgrace. It had been so public, so shameless. She had summoned this man to her side. She had flaunted her preference for him before his very face, and now——
He cursed her in his heart, as still, with fevered haste and strange, impetuous movements, he gathered together his few possessions. Then he locked his box and wrote a hurried note to the manager of the hotel, inclosing a check and stating that the portmanteau would be sent for later on. A hurried glance around—a glance which passed over the letter he had written but a few brief hours before. It lay where it had fallen from his hand when he sank into the chair by his writing-table—lay there so innocent, yet so fraught with power to work remorse or retribution in days that were to come.
The gray light of the early dawn gleamed like a pale phosphorescence over the shadowy corridor, and lit with spectral mystery the white statue and the dusky palms. He shuddered as his eyes fell on them. How significant they had become.
Then, with a smothered oath that breathed vengeance for the future, he rushed down the staircase and past the sleeping porter in the entrance hall, and in another moment was standing in the fresh, sweet atmosphere of life and light that God and Nature have so freely given to the thankless, sated eyes of men.
How that day passed Lord Francis never knew. It seemed to him, when his senses grew clearer, that weeks and months must have gone by since that awful moment that had brought to him the full and complete knowledge of his wife’s perfidy. Yet there had been a strange and consistent purpose in all his actions. He had walked for miles and miles before taking the train. He had reached London, and driven straight to his chambers, to the no small dismay and discomfiture of his man, who had been inaugurating a brief spell of leisure not as wisely as he might have done. He had given orders to this man to pack up clothes sufficient for a long journey, paid his wages, arranged with his usual caretaker to remain in the chambers, then departed for Charing Cross to catch the tidal train en route for Paris.
All this he remembered afterward. Remembered vaguely, impassively, as if every action had been performed by someone apart and outside of himself; as if he had been spectator instead of actor. Remembered, even as he remembered the crowded station, the flashing lights, the hoarse cries of the porters, the bustle and confusion on the platform, and high above all the shrill voice of the newsvendors crying out the news of the evening papers—“Pall Mall!” “St. James Gazette!” or “Star! Latest edition! Mysterious murder of a foreign count in a hotel! Latest special!”