part I played.

I went to bed, but never to sleep. All night long I tossed, struggling to unravel the disorder in my brain. I could think out nothing collectively--warp and woof were inextricably confused.

At length, in despair, I rose, redressed and went outside. The church clocks clanged six as I stepped onto the pavement; there was a fresh-blown coolness in the dusky air; the streets stretched emptily to the dawn.

In the very contact with space, the tumult in my head settled down into some manner of order, and I was able to face, after a fashion, the problem before me.

Here, to one side, would I place Zyp; to the other Dolly. Let me plead to each, counseled by heart and conscience. To Zyp: You have and have ever had that of mine to which I can give no name, but which men call “love,” as an expression of what is inexpressible. I know that this gift, this sixth sense, that, like the soul, embraces all the others, once acquired, is indestructible. For joy or evil I am doomed to it, spiritually to profit or be debased by it. You may scorn, but you cannot kill it, and exiled in material form from you here it will make to you in the hereafter as surely as a stone flung from a crater returns to the earth of which it is kin.

Say that the accidents of existence are to keep us here apart; that your heart desires to mate with another more picturesque than mine. It may be so. During these long four years you have never once directly, by word or sign, given proof that my being holds any interest for you. You banished me, I must remember, for all my efforts to torture hope out of them, with words designed to be final. What if I accept the sentence and say: “I yield my material form to one who desires its affections; who will be made most happy by the bestowal of them upon her; who yearns to me, perhaps, as I to you.” I may do so and none the less be sure of you some day.

To Dolly: I have done you a bitter wrong, but one, I think, not irremediable. Perhaps I never thought but that friendship apart from love was possible between man and woman. In any case, I have given far too much consideration to myself and far too little to you. You love me by your own confession, and, in this world of bitter troubles, it is very sweet to be loved, and loved by such as you. I am pledged, it seems, to a hopeless quest. What if I give it up? What if we taste joy in this world--the joy of a partnership that is graced by strong affection and cemented by a respect that shall be mutual? I can atone for my error to you here; my wilder love that is not to be controlled by moral reasoning I consign to futurity.

Thinking these thoughts, a picture rose before me of a restful haven, wherein my storm-beaten life might rock at anchor to the end; of Dolly as my wife, in all the fascination of her pretty, winning personality--her love, her playfulness, her wistful eyes and rosy mouth so responsive to laughter or tears. I felt very tender toward the child, who was glorified into woman by her very succumbing to the passion she had so long concealed. “Why should I struggle any longer?” I cried in my heart, “when an earthly paradise opens its gates to me; when self-sacrifice means peace and content, and to indulge my imagination means misery?”

It was broad daylight by the time I had touched some clew to the problem that so bewildered me, and suddenly I became aware that I was moving in the midst of a great press of people. They were all going in one direction and were generally of the lowest and most degraded classes in London. There was a boisterous and unclean mirth rampant among them. There was a ravenous eagerness of haste, too, that one seemed to associate instinctively with the hideous form of vampire that crouches over fields of slain and often completes what the bullet has but half done. Women were among them in numbers; some carrying infants in their gaunt, ragged arms; some plumed and decked as if for a gala sight.

I was weary with thought; weary with the monotony of introspection. Evidently there was some excitement toward, and to follow it up would take me out of myself.

Toiling up Ludgate hill we went, an army of tramping feet. Then, like a sewer diverted, we wheeled and poured into the noisome alley of the Old Bailey.

In a moment the truth burst upon me with a shock. There was a man to be hanged that morning!

I twisted hurriedly about and strove to force my way out again. I might as easily have stayed the Thames with a finger. I was beaten back with oaths and coarse ribaldry--gathered up and carried ruthlessly in the rush for place--hemmed in, planted like a maggot in one great trunk of bestial and frouzy human flesh. Had I striven again I should have been smashed and pounded underfoot, all semblance of life stamped from me.

I looked about me in agony. Before and around was one huge sea of faces, from the level of which rose a jangling patter of talk and cries, like bubbles bursting on the surface of a seething tank of corruption. And under the grim shadow of Newgate there stood, in full view, a hideous machine. Barriers were about it, and a spruce cordon of officials, who stood out humanly in that garden of squalid refuse. It was black, with a black crossbeam; and from the beam a loop hung motionless, like a collar for death to grin through, and the crowd were already betting on the expression of his face when he should first see it.

I do not know how long or short a time my anguish lasted. It may have been half an hour, when the deep tolling of a bell wrought sudden silence in the fetid air. At its first stroke the roar of voices went off and lessened, rolling like a peal of thunder; at its third the quiet of eternity had fallen and consumed the world.

A mist came before my eyes. When it cleared I was aware of a little group on the platform, and one, with a ghastly white face, the center of it.

“Who is it?” I whispered, in intolerable agony.

“Curse you!” growled my next neighbor. “Can’t you hold your tongue and let a cove look?”

A word marred the full relish of his appetite.

I managed to slew my head away from the direct line of vision. A low babble of voices came from the scaffold. He must be reprieved, I thought, with a leap of the heart. I could not conceive voices sounding natural, otherwise, under such fearful circumstances.

Suddenly, as I was on the point of looking once more to ease my horrible tension of mind, there dropped upon my ears a low rumbling flap, and immediately a hoarse murmur went up from the multitude. Then, giving a cry myself, I turned my face. The rope hung down in a straight line, but loop and man were gone.

From the universal murmur, by claps and starts, the old uproar bubbled forth from the faces, till the pent-up street resounded with it. An after-dinner loquacity was on all and the fellow who had cursed me a minute ago addressed me now with over-brimming geniality of information.

“Who’s him, says you? Why, where’s your wits gone, matey? Him was Mul-ler, the greasy furriner as murdered old Briggs.”

The trial had made sensation enough of late, but the date of the poor wretch’s execution I had had no thought of.

When at last I could force a passage through the press--for they lingered like ghouls over the crumbs of the banquet--I broke into Holborn, with my whole soul panting and crying for fresh air and forgetfulness. It was hideous, it was inhuman, it was debasing, I cried to myself, to launch that quivering mass of terror into eternity in a public shambles! To such as came to see, it must be grossly demoralizing; to those who, like me, were enforced spectators, it was a sickening experience that must leave an impression of morbidity almost indelible.

Suddenly I felt a hand grasp my shoulder and a voice exclaim: “Renny, by all the saints!”

I turned--and it was Jason.

He held me at arm’s length and cried again: “Renny? Really?--and a true sportsman as of old!”

Then he leaned to me and whispered with a grin: “I say, old fellow, if it wasn’t for luck you might be any day where he stood just now.”