XVII
John Egerton came home very weary that evening; and all the way home things went wrong as they had gone wrong on a certain evening in when he had come home tired to find the Byrnes’ maid on the doorstep, and told the first lie about the sack. Tonight again the trains went wrong, and they were stuffy and packed, difficult to enter and difficult to leave and abominable to be in. It was one of the exceptionally hateful journeys which men remember as they remember battles. It was of a piece with that night in , and John thought of them together as he walked home, hot and jumpy with irritation. Nothing had gone right since that night—nothing. He had lost his love, and his good name, and his peace of mind—and his best friend. He had had faith in Stephen then; he had admired and loved—had almost idolized him. Tonight he felt that he hated Stephen. Not a word from him—not one word of encouragement or gratitude in all this filthy business of the articles. Not that he wanted Stephen to do anything—oh no! He had made his vow and he would stick to it. But it did hurt that Stephen should take this sacrifice so much as a matter of course, should do nothing to help him in this new storm of suspicion. He had been a good friend once—a jolly, companionable friend, openhearted and full of laughter—the best friend a lonely bachelor could have. Well, it was done with now. He had lost that as he had lost everything else. And it had all begun with that lie. Perhaps it was a judgment. Perhaps there was never a virtuous lie.
He had bought at Charing Cross the number of The Argus, because he had seen on the cover the name of Stephen Byrne, and he read everything that Stephen wrote. After dinner he sat down and read “The Death in the Wood.” And at first he read, as Margery had read, only with admiration, though it was now a jealous, almost reluctant admiration. He thought, “How can a mean swine like Stephen create such glorious high-minded stuff?” It was unnatural, wrong.
While he was reading the bell rang. Mrs. Bantam came in. “It’s them Gaunts,” she whispered. The Gaunt family had not been near him for months, and now they had come to pluck the certain fruit of the I Say articles. They stood in a defiant cluster in the tiny hall. John, for once, fortified and embittered by the exasperations of the Underground, allowed himself to be violently angry. He took a stick from the rack and shouted at them, “Get out of my house—or I’ll—I’ll throw you out!” A little to his surprise they did go out, and he went back to “The Death in the Wood,” pleasantly relieved by his self-assertion and anger.
He read on through the burial in the lake, and the finding of the maiden, and the battle at the lake where the faithful Tristram fought and was wounded. Then he came to the wooing in the castle, the false wooing by Gelert of Tristram’s lady, the lovely Isobel. And here the soft heart of John melted within him; for the picture of Isobel which Stephen had drawn was so like the picture of Muriel that was ever in his own mind, a fair and gracious and relenting lady; and the hot words of Gelert were such words as he would have uttered and had dreamed himself uttering to Muriel Tarrant. But Muriel Tarrant had done with him, it seemed; she would hardly nod at him across the road; he had not spoken to her alone since that miserable dance. And this poetry of Stephen Byrne’s was the perfect expression of his faithful devotion, and made him almost weep with sentimental regret.
He read these passages several times. Then he went on to the poisoning by Gelert of Isobel’s mind against her old lover, and his conquest of her, and his cruel desertion of her. And somewhere among those terrible lines the thought came to him as it had come to Margery, with a red-hot excruciating stab—that this story was a true story. And he looked back then, as Margery had looked, at the first pages of the poem and at the memory of those dreadful months in the new light of his suspicions. He remembered the dance, and Muriel’s face at the dance; how kind at the beginning of it, how cold and cruel at the end—when she had danced many times with Stephen. He remembered how he had met her in in the street; and how in her sidelong look there had been not only that coldness, but also a certain shame. Could it be? …
Once, he was sure, she had liked him a little—in the end he could have won her; she would have relieved him of this loneliness—this loneliness in an empty house with the hateful whining at the windows; but something devilish and unknown had got in the way. … And if it was Stephen, and Stephen’s lies. … God! He would go to Muriel, he would go to Stephen; he would have it out of them, he would go now—
And as he paced up and down the room, working himself into a fever of rage, that terrible cry came out of the night, and he rushed out into the
