“It was over-indulgence in wine that made me set to myself this penalty of studious solitude,” said Baltazar in Chinese. “By telling you this I redeem a promise. As to our daily custom, a weak man flies from temptation, a strong man keeps temptation at his elbow in order to defy it.”
“In that way, honourable master, is merit acquired.”
Quong Ho took away his empty plate and retired into the kitchen to fetch the next course. Baltazar leaned back in his chair and, his brow full of perplexity, yet breathed a sigh of relief.
“I’ve got it off my chest at last,” he said half aloud. “But I wonder whether I’ve been a damned fool.”
Quong Ho’s subsequent demeanour could not enlighten him. Never again between them, save once, and that under the stress of a peculiar situation, was made the most veiled allusion to the subject, and day after day Quong Ho imperturbably performed with the Burgundy decanter the ceremonial etiquette of the English dinner-table.
It was only by glimpses like this that the man had ever revealed himself to his fellow-creatures. Glimpses like this one, fine and deliberate, to Quong Ho, and that one of long ago, passionate and self-destroying, to Marcelle Baring. To neither did he accord more than a glimpse. To neither did he show himself on a razor-edged ledge with the abyss on one side and salvation on the other. Another touch of the girl’s lips would have sent them both into what the sensitive and honourable gentleman would have called the abyss. Perhaps, if she had been older, a woman, one tuned to the pulsating responsibilities of life, he might have faced things with her. Who knows? To his direct mind the casuistical point did not occur. Actualities alone concerned him. She was so delicate and fragrant a flower of girlhood. His for the plucking. . . . When he regained his college rooms, that far-off summer afternoon, he was as a man torn by devils. Love her? He would be torn in pieces rather than that her exquisite foot should be bruised against a stone. Love her? With her soft voice, her maddening Madonna face, her kind eyes, her tremulous mouth? Love her? The wonder of wonders possessed of the power to divine his inmost thoughts, to touch with magically healing fingers all the aching wounds in his soul, to envelop him body and mind and spirit in a network of a myriad fairy tendrils? Love her? God knows he did.
But she was a child—and a child can forget—at the worst retain a not ungracious memory. But he was a man, on the verge of hideous villainy. And he stood in his college room, surrounded by all that symbolized the intellectual life that up to then had been the meaning of his existence, and he looked around.
“The whole lot will have to go to blazes,” said he.
And at that moment he cut the Gordian knot.