He walked out of the shop somewhat lighter of heart, his instinct for the scrupulous satisfied. The abominable cheque no longer burned through letter-case and raiment and body and corroded his soul. He had devoted the money to the purpose for which it was ear-marked. The precision was soothed. In puzzling darkness he had also taken an enormous psychological stride.
The familiar club became unbearable, his fellow-members abhorrent. Friends and acquaintances outside—and they were legion—who, taking pity on his loneliness, sought him out and invited him to their houses, he shunned in a curious terror. He was forever meeting them in the streets. Behind their masks of sympathy he read his wife's deadly accusation and its confirmation which he had received from Haversham and Bagot. When the scourge arrived—a business-like instrument in a cardboard box—he sat for a long time in his club bedroom drawing the knotted cords between his fingers, lost in retrospective thought.... And suddenly a scene flashed across his mind. Venice. The first days of their honeymoon. The sun-baked Renaissance façade of a church in a Campo bounded by a canal where their gondola lay waiting. A tattered, one-legged, be-crutched beggar holding out his hat by the church door.... He, Hildebrand, stalked majestically past, his wife following. Near the fondamenta he turned and discovered her in the act of tendering from her purse a two-lire piece to the beggar who had hobbled expectant in her wake. Hildebrand interposed a hand; the shock accidentally jerked the coin from hers. It rolled. The one-legged beggar threw himself prone, in order to seize it. But it rolled into the canal. An agony of despair and supplication mounted from the tatterdemalion's eyes.
"Oh, Hildebrand, give him another."
"Certainly not," he replied. "It's immoral to encourage mendicity."
She wept in the gondola. He thought her silly, and told her so. They landed at the Molo and he took her to drink chocolate at Florian's on the Piazza. She bent her meek head over the cup and the tears fell into it. A well-dressed Venetian couple who sat at the next table stared at her, passed remarks, and giggled outright with the ordinary and exquisite Italian politeness.
"My dear Eliza," said Hildebrand, "if you can't help being a victim to sickly sentimentality, at least, as my wife, you must learn to control yourself in public."
And meekly she controlled herself and drank her salted chocolate. In compliance with a timidly expressed desire, and in order to show his forgiveness, he escorted her into the open square, and like any vulgar Cook's tourist bought her a paper cornet of dried peas, wherewith, to his self-conscious martyrdom, she fed the pigeons. Seeing an old man some way off do the same, she scattered a few grains along the curled-up brim of her Leghorn hat; and presently, so still she was and gracious, an iridescent swarm enveloped her, eating from both hands outstretched and encircling her head like a halo. For the moment she was the embodiment of innocent happiness. But Hildebrand thought her notoriously absurd, and when he saw Lord and Lady Benham approaching them from the Piazzetta, he stepped forward and with an abrupt gesture sent the pigeons scurrying away. And she looked for the vanished birds with much the same scared piteousness as the one-legged beggar had looked for the lost two-lire piece.
After thirty years the memory of that afternoon flamed vivid, as he drew the strings of the idle scourge between his fingers. And then the puzzling darkness overspread his mind.
After a while he replaced the scourge in the cardboard box and summoned the club valet.
"Pack up all my things," said he. "I am going abroad to-morrow by the eleven o'clock train from Victoria."