He walked so slowly that it was half-past nine when he let himself into his chambers in the Albany. His servant was out, and the rooms looked dismal and lonely. They were not dismal, being on the second floor, where it is light and airy, and being furnished as mediæval bachelorhood with plenty of money alone understands furniture. But he was nervous to-night, and grim stories came into his mind of spectres and strange visitors to lonely men in chambers. Such things happen mostly, he remembered, on twilight evenings in midsummer. He was quite right. The only ghost I ever saw myself was in one of the Inns of Court, in chambers, at nine o'clock on a June evening.
He made haste to light a lamp—no such abomination as gas was permitted in Lawrence Colquhoun's chambers: it was one of the silver reading-lamps, good for small tables, and provided with a green shade, so that the light might fall in a bright circle, which was Cimmertian blackness shading off into the sepia of twilight. It was his habit, too, to have lighted candles on the mantelshelf and on a table; but to-night he forgot them, so that, except for the light cast upwards by the gas in the court and an opposite window illuminated, and for the half-darkness of the June evening, the room was dark. It was very quiet, too. There was no footsteps in the court below, and no voices or steps in the room near him. His nearest neighbour, young Lord Orlebar, would certainly not be home, much before one or two, when he might return with a few friends connected with the twin services of the army and the ballet for a little cheerful supper. Below him was old Sir Richard de Counterpane, who was by this time certainly in bed, and perhaps sound asleep. Very quiet—he had never known it more quiet; and he began to feel as if it would be a relief to his nerves were something or somebody to make a little noise.
He took a novel, one that he had begun a week ago. Whether the novel of the day is inferior to the novel of Colquhoun's youth, or whether he was a bad reader of fiction, certainly he had been more than a week over the first volume alone.
Now it interested him less than ever.
He threw it away and lit a cigar. And then his thoughts went back to Victoria. What was the devil which possessed the woman that she could not rest quiet? What was the meaning of this madness upon her?
"A cold—an Arctic woman," Lawrence murmured. "Cold when I told her how much I loved her; cold when she engaged herself to me; cold in her crime; and yet she follows me about as if she was devoured by the ardour of love, like another Sappho."
It was not that, Lawrence Colquhoun; it was the spretæ injuria formæ, the jealousy and hatred caused by the lost power.
"I wish," he said, starting to his feet, and walking like the Polar bear across his den and back again, "I wish to heaven I had gone on living in the Empire City with my pair of villainous Chinamen. At least I was free from her over there. And when I saw her marriage, by Gad! I thought it was a finisher. Then I came home again."
He stopped in his retrospection, because he heard a foot upon the stairs.
A woman's foot; a light step and a quick step.