The Masquerader | Page 3

the stranger to draw back a step. "Oh, I read my newspaper with the other five million, that is all. I am an outsider." His voice sounded curt; the warmth that admiration had brought into it a moment before had frozen abruptly.
"An outsider!" Chilcote repeated. "What an enviable word!"
"Possibly, to those who are well inside the ring. But let us go back to Lexington. What a pinnacle the man reached, and what a drop he had! It has always seemed to me an extraordinary instance of the human leaven running through us all. What was the real cause of his collapse?" he asked, suddenly. "Was it drugs or drink? I have often wished to get at the truth."
Again Chilcote changed his attitude.
"Is truth ever worth getting at?" he asked, irrelevantly.
"In the case of a public man--yes. He exchanges his privacy for the interest of the masses. If he gives the masses the details of his success, why not the details of his failure? But was it drink that sucked him under?"
"No." Chilcote's response came after a pause.
"Drugs?"
Again Chilcote hesitated. And at the moment of his indecision a woman brushed past him, laughing boisterously. The sound jarred him.
"Was it drugs?" the stranger went on easily. "I have always had a theory that it was."
"Yes. It was morphia." The answer came before Chilcote had realized it. The woman's laugh at the stranger's quiet persistence had contrived to draw it from him. Instantly he had spoken he looked about him quickly, like one who has for a moment forgotten a necessary vigilance.
There was silence while the stranger thought over the information just given him. Then he spoke again, with a new touch of vehemence.
"So I imagined," he said. "Though, on my soul, I never really credited it. To have gained so much, and to have thrown it away for a common vice!" He made an exclamation of disgust.
Chilcote gave an unsteady laugh. "You judge hardly." he said.
The other repeated his sound of contempt. "Justly so. No man has the right to squander what another would give his soul for. It lessens the general respect for power."
"You are a believer in power?" The tone was sarcastic, but the sarcasm sounded thin.
"Yes. All power is the outcome of individuality, either past or present. I find no sentiment for the man who plays with it."
The quiet contempt of the tone stung Chilcote.
"Do you imagine that Lexington made no fight?" he asked, impulsively. "Can't you picture the man's struggle while the vice that had been slave gradually became master?" He stopped to take breath, and in the cold pause that followed it seemed to him that the other made a murmur of incredulity.
"Perhaps you think of morphia as a pleasure?" he added. "Think of it, instead, as a tyrant--that tortures the mind if held to, and the body if cast off." Urged by the darkness and the silence of his companion, the rein of his speech had loosened. In that moment he was not Chilcote the member for East Wark, whose moods and silences were proverbial, but Chilcote the man whose mind craved the relief of speech.
"You talk as the world talks--out of ignorance and self-righteousness," he went on. "Before you condemn Lexington you should put yourself in his place--"
"As you do?" the other laughed.
Unsuspecting and inoffensive as the laugh was, it startled Chilcote. With a sudden alarm he pulled himself up.
"I--?" He tried to echo the laugh, but the attempt fell flat. "Oh, I merely speak from--from De Quincey. But I believe this fog is shifting--I really believe it is shifting. Can you oblige me with a light? I had almost forgotten that a man may still smoke though he has been deprived of sight." He spoke fast and disjointedly. He was overwhelmed by the idea that he had let himself go, and possessed by the wish to obliterate the consequences. As he talked he fumbled; for his cigarette-case.
His bead was bent as he searched for it nervously. Without looking up, he was conscious that the cloud of fog that held him prisoner was lifting, rolling away, closing back again, preparatory to final disappearance. Having found the case, he put a cigarette between his lips and raised his hand at the moment that the stranger drew a match across his box.
For a second each stared blankly at the other's face, suddenly made visible by the lifting of the fog. The match in the stranger's hand burned down till it scorched his fingers, and, feeling the pain, he laughed and let it drop.
"Of all odd things!" he said. Then he broke off. The circumstance was too novel for ordinary remark.
By one of those rare occurrences, those chances that seem too wild for real life and yet belong to no other sphere, the two faces so strangely hidden