She advanced a step nearer to me, and looked me straight in the eyes defiantly.
“I told him that I loved you with all my heart and all my soul. I told him that you didn't know it; that you didn't care a brass curse for me; that you had acted as you thought best for the happiness of himself and me. I told him that while you lived I could not think of another man. I told him that if you could face Death with a smile on your face, he might very well show the same courage and not chuck things right and left just because a common woman wouldn't marry him or live with him and spoil his career. There! That's what I told him. What do you think?”
“Heaven knows what effect it will have,” said I, wearily, for I was very, very tired. “But why, my poor Lola, have you wasted your love on a shadow like me?”
She answered after the foolish way of women.
I have not heard from either Dale or Lady Kynnersley. A day or two ago, in reply to a telegram to Raggles, I learned that Dale had lost the election.
This, then, is the end of my apologia pro vita mea, which I began with so resonant a flourish of vainglory. I have said all that there is to be said. Nothing more has happened or is likely to happen until they put me under the earth. Oh, yes, I was forgetting. In spite of my Monte Cristo munificence, poor Latimer has been hammered on the Stock Exchange. Poor Lucy and the kids!
I shall have, I think, just enough strength left to reach Mentone—this place is intolerable now—and there I shall put myself under the care of a capable physician who, with his abominable drugs, will doubtless begin the cheerful work of inducing the mental decay which I suppose must precede physical dissolution.
I must confess that I am disappointed with the manner of my exit. I had imagined it quite different. I had beheld myself turning with a smile and a jest for one last view of the faces over which I, in my eumoirous career, had cast the largesse of happiness, and the vanishing with a gallant carelessness through the dusky portals. Instead of that, here am I sneaking out of life by the back door, covering my eyes for very shame. And glad? Oh, God, how glad I am to slink out of it!
I have indeed accomplished the thing which I set out to do. I have severed a boy from the object of his passion. What an achievement for the crowning glory of a lifetime! And at what a cost: one fellow-creature's life and another's reason. On me lies the responsibility. Vauvenarde, it is true, did not adorn this grey world, but he drew the breath of life, and, through my jesting agency, it was cut off. Anastasius Papadopoulos, had he not come under my malign influence would have lived out his industrious, happy and dream-filled days. Lesser, but still great price, too, has been paid. Jealous hatred, misery and failure for the being I care most for in the world, the shame of a sordid scandal to those that hold me dear, the hopeless love and speedy mourning of a woman not without greatness.
I have tried to make a Tom Fool of Destiny—and Destiny has proved itself to be the superior jester of the two, and has made a grim and bedraggled Tom Fool of me.