CHAPTER II
THE judge pronounced sentence: three years' penal servitude. The condemned woman, ashen-cheeked, thin-lipped, gave never a glance to right or left, and disappeared from the dock like a ghost.
John Risca, the woman's husband, who had been sitting at the solicitor's table, rose, watched her disappear, and then, the object of all curious eyes, with black brow and square jaw strode out of the court. Walter Herold, following him, joined him in the corridor, and took his arm in a protective way and guided him down the great staircase into the indifferent street. Then he hailed a cab.
“'May I come with you?”
Risca nodded assent. It was a comfort to feel by his side something human in this pandemonium of a world.
“Eighty-four Fenton Square, Westminster.” Herold gave the address of Risca's lodgings, and entered the cab. During the journey through the wide thoroughfares hurrying with London's afternoon traffic neither spoke. There are ghastly tragedies in life for which words, however sympathetic and comprehending, are ludicrously inadequate. Now and then Herold glanced at the heavy, set face of the man who was dear to him and cursed below his breath. Of course nothing but morbid pig-headedness in the first fatal instance had brought him to this disaster. But, after all, is pig-headedness a crime meriting so overwhelming a punishment? Why should fortune favour some, like himself, who just danced lightly upon life, and take a diabolical delight in breaking others upon her wheel? Was it because John Risca could dance no better than a bull, and, like a bull, charged through life insensately, with lowered horns and blundering hoofs? This lunatic marriage, six years ago, when Risca was three and twenty, with a common landlady's commoner pretty vixen of a daughter, he himself had done his best to prevent. He had pleaded with the tongue of an angel and vituperated in the vocabulary of a bargee. He might as well have played “Home, Sweet Home,” on the flute or recited Bishop Ernulphus's curse to the charging bull. But still, however unconsidered, honourable marriage ought not of itself to bring down from heaven the doom of the house of Atreus. This particular union was bound to be unhappy; but why should it have been Æschylean in its catastrophe?
As Risca uttered no word, Herold, with the ultimate wisdom of despair, held his peace.
At last they arrived at the old-world, dilapidated square, where Risca lodged. Children, mostly dirty-faced, those of the well-to-do being distinguished at this post-tea hour of the afternoon by a circle of treacle encrusting like gems the circumambient grime about their little mouths, squabbled shrilly on the pavement. Torn oilcloth and the smell of the sprats fried the night before last for the landlord's supper greeted him who entered the house. Risca, the aristocrat of the establishment, rented the drawing-room floor. Herold, sensitive artist, successful actor, appreciated by dramatic authors and managers and the public as a Meissonier of small parts, and therefore seldom out of an engagement, who had created for himself a Queen Anne gem of a tiny house in Kensington, could never enter Risca's home without a shiver. To him it was horror incarnate, the last word of unpenurious squalor. There were material shapes to sit down upon, to sit at, it is true, things on the walls (terribilia visu) to look upon, such as “The Hunter's Return,” and early portraits of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, and the floor was covered with a red-and-green imitation Oriental carpet; but there was no furniture, as Herold understood the word, nothing to soothe or to please. One of the chairs was of moth-eaten saddle-bag, another of rusty leather. A splotch of grease, the trace left by a far-distant storm of gravy that had occurred on a super-imposed white cloth, and a splotch of ink gave variety to a faded old table-cover. A litter of books and papers and unemptied ash-trays and pipes and slippers disfigured the room. The place suggested chaos coated with mildew.