The voice in which he spoke was so unlike his own, so rasping and defiant, that Weldon, with the dread which every respectable householder has of a scene at his own front door, motioned him up the steps. “Come in,” he said, mellifluously, “I am glad to see you.”
“I will,” Tristrem answered, in a tone as arrogant as before.
“I am sorry,” Weldon continued, “Nanny—”
“I did not come to see your wife; you know it.”
Weldon had unlatched the door, and the two men passed into the sitting room. There Weldon, with his hat unremoved, dropped in a chair, and eyed his visitor with affected curiosity.
“I say, Trissy, you’re drunk.”
“I am come,” Tristrem continued, and this time as he spoke his voice seemed to recover something of its former gentleness, “I am come to ask whether, in the purlieus of your heart, there is nothing to tell you how base you are.”
Weldon stretched himself languidly, took off his hat, stood up, and lit a cigarette. “Have an Egyptian?” he asked.
“Do you remember,” Tristrem went on, “the last time I saw you?”
Weldon tossed the match into an ash-receiver, and, with the cigarette between his teeth, sprawled himself out on a sofa. “Well, what of it?”
“When I saw you, you had just contracted a debt. And now you can liquidate that debt either by throwing yourself in the river or—”
“Charming, Triss, charming! You have made a bon mot. I will get that off. Liquidate a debt with water is really good. There’s the advantage of foreign travel for you.”
“Do you know what became of your victim? Do you know? She went abroad and hid herself. Shall I give you details?”
For the first time Weldon scowled.
“Would you like the details?” Tristrem repeated.
Weldon mastered his scowl. “No,” he answered, negligently. “I am not a midwife. Obstetrics do not interest me. On the contra—”
That word he never finished. Something exploded in his brain, he saw one fleeting flash, and he was dead. Even as he spoke, Tristrem had whipped an instrument from his pocket, and before Weldon was aware of his purpose, a knife, thin as a darning-needle and long as a pencil—a knife which it had taken the splendid wickedness of medieval Rome to devise—had sunk into his heart, and was out again, leaving behind it a pin’s puncture through the linen, one infinitesimal bluish-gray spot on the skin, and death.
Tristrem looked at him. The shirt was not even rumpled. If he had so much as quivered, the quiver had been imperceptible, and on the knife there was no trace of blood. It fell from his fingers; he stooped to pick it up, but his hand trembled so that, on recovering it, he could not insert the point into the narrow sheath that belonged to it, and, throwing the bit of embroidered leather in a corner, he put the weapon in his pocket.
“It was easier than I thought,” he mused. “I suppose—h’m—I seem to be nervous. It’s odd. I feared that afterward I should collapse like an omelette soufflée. And to think that it is done!”
He turned suspiciously, and looked at the body again. No, he could see it was really done. “And so, this is afterward,” he continued. “And to think that it was here I first saw her. She came in that door there. I remember I thought of a garden of lilies.”
From the dining room beyond he caught the glimmer of a lamp. He crossed the intervening space, and on the sideboard he found some decanters. He selected one, and pouring a little of its contents into a tumbler he drank it off. Then he poured another portion, and when he had drunk that too, he went out, not through the sitting room, but through the hall, and, picking up the hat which on entering he had thrown on the table, he left the house.
XVI
Several thousand years ago a thinker defined virtue as the agreement of the will and the conscience. If the will were coercible the definition would be matchless. Unfortunately it is not. Will declines to be reasoned with; it insists, and in its insistence conscience, horrified or charmed, stands a witness to its acts.
For a fortnight Tristrem had been married to an impulse against which his finer nature rebelled. It was not that the killing of such a one as Weldon was unjustifiable; on the contrary, it was rather praiseworthy than otherwise. His crime was one for which the noose is too good. But to Weldon, in earlier days, he had felt as to a brother; and though affection may die, does it not leave behind it a memory which should thereafter serve as a protecting shield? It had been the bonds of former attachment, bonds long loosened, it is true, but of which the old impress still lingered, that seemed to Tristrem to tie his hands. Then, too, was the horror of such a thing. There is nothing, a Scandinavian poet has said, more beautiful than a beautiful revenge; yet when a man is so tender of heart that if it be raining he will hesitate to shoo a persistent fly out of the window, it is difficult for that man, however great the aggravation, to take another’s life. Besides, the impulse which had acted in Tristrem was not one of revenge. He had not the slightest wish to take the law into his own hands. The glaive of atonement was not one which he felt himself called upon to wield. That which possessed him was the idea that until the world was rid of Weldon there was a girl somewhere who could not look her own mother in the face. And that girl was the girl whom he loved, a girl who apparently had no other protector than himself.
In the rehearsals, it was this that had strung his nerves to acting pitch. When it
