  AT the same time the haze lightened about him: he saw clearly his surroundings, the black, glittering windows of stores, the gleaming rails which bound the stone street. His hat was gone and he had long before lost the bundle that contained his linen. But the loss was of small moment now—he had money, a pocketful of it, and forty-seven thousand dollars waiting in Ellerton: his father was a scrupulous, truthful and exact man. Eliza and he would have been immediately married, gone to a little green village, under a red mountain; Eliza would have worn the most beautiful dresses made by a parrot; but that, he recognized shrewdly, was an idiotic fancy—birds didn't make dresses. And now she was dead. He entered a place of multitudinous mirrors reflecting a woman's flickering limbs, sly and bearded masculine faces, that somehow were vaguely familiar. “Champagne!” he cried, against the bar. “Your champagne'll come across in a schooner.” But, impatiently, he shoved a handful of money into the zinc gutter. “Champagne!” he reiterated thickly. The barkeeper deduced four dollars and returned the balance. “Sink it,” he advised, “or you'll get it lifted on you.” With the wine, the mist deepened once more about him; the ache—was it in his head or his heart?—grew duller. He had poured out a third glass when a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and whirling suspiciously, he saw a uniform cap, a man's gaunt face and burning eyes. “Brother,” the latter said, “brother, shall we leave this reeking sink, and go out together into God's night?” Blinking, Anthony recognized the livery, the accents, of the Salvation Army. A sullen anger burned within him—this man was a sort of official connection of God's, who had killed Eliza. He smoothed out his face cunningly, moved obediently toward the other, and struck him viciously across the face. Pandemonium rose instantly about him, an incredible number of men appeared shouting, gesticulating, and formed in a ring of blurred, grinning faces. The jaw of the Salvation Army man was bright with blood, dark drops fell on his threadbare coat. His hand closed again on Anthony's shoulder. “Strive, brother,” he cried. “The Mansion door is open.” Anthony regarded him with insolent disdain. “Ought to be exposed,” he articulated, “whole thing... humbug. Isn't any such—such... Eliza's dead, ain't she?” A ripple of merriment ran about the circle of loose, stained lips; the curious, ribald eyes glittered with cold mirth; the circle flattened with the pressure of those without, impatient for a better view. Anthony surveyed them with impotent fury, loathing, and they met his passionate anger with faces as stony, as inhuman, as cruel, carved masks. He heard her name, the name of the gracious and beautiful vision of his adoration, repeated in hoarse, in maculate, in gibing tones. “She's dead,” he repeated sharply, as though that fact should impose silence on them; “you filthy curs!” But their approbation of the spectacle became only the more marked. The Salvation Army man fastened his hectic gaze upon Anthony; he was, it was evident, unaware of the blood drying upon his face, of the throng about them. “There is no death,” he proclaimed. “There is no death!” “But she is dead,” Anthony insisted; “pneumonia... with green eyes and foggy hands.” They began an insane argument: Eliza was gone, Anthony reiterated, the other could not deny that she was lost to life, to the sun. He recalled statements of Rufus Hardinge's, crisp iconoclasms of Annot's, and fitted them into the patchwork of his labored speech. Texts were flung aloft like flags by the other; ringing sentences in the incomparable English of King James echoed about the walls, the bottles of the saloon and beat upon the throng, the blank hearts, the beery brains, of the spectators. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” he orated, “for they... for they...”
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