The victory was complete. The sudden collapse of the firms caused a sensation all over the country. The newspapers were ringing with his name. He was the hero of the hour. At Ecclesby he was the hero for all time. His first appearance after the announcement of the terms of settlement was a signal for extravagant demonstration. Men shouted themselves hoarse, and fought to shake hands with him. Women wept upon each other’s necks and shrilled out blessings. One, mad with joy, threw her arms around him and kissed him. A torch-light procession, headed by two frenzied bands, playing “See the Conquering Hero comes,” carried him in triumph through the streets.

For the time his heart glowed with the intoxication of success and popular worship. But when the shouts of the crowd had ceased ringing in his ears, the glow faded like a false glamour, and left him face to face with grim realities, before which all else seemed shadowy. As soon as he reached London, he went with whirling thoughts to Queen’s Court Mansions.

What he should say to Lady Phayre he did not know. All that he had defined was a fierce hunger to see her again, a wild longing to throw himself at her feet. The dormant passion of the man had awakened and shook him to the depths of his nature. His love for her had flowed so calmly, had quickened so imperceptibly, had maintained so smooth a surface with passionate depths so unsuspected, that when the sudden chasm met its course, it dashed down an overwhelming cataract that swept him headlong into unknown abysses. The blood swirled through his veins as he stood waiting outside the familiar door. The servant opened it. Lady Phayre was unwell, was not receiving any visitors. “Is she in bed?” asked Daniel rudely.

“She is keeping her room, sir.”

“Tell her that I wish to see her.”

The servant retired, and returned with the message that Lady Phayre could not possibly receive, and would not be well enough to do so for some time. He had to depart, raging with disappointment. He went home, shut himself up in his room, and wrote to her. The days passed, and he received no reply. A second letter met with similar treatment. Then he called again. This time neither the electric bell, nor the little brass knocker, caused the door to be opened. At the entrance to the Mansions he met the porter, who told him that Lady Phayre had locked up her flat for six months, and had gone to the south of France.

Then, and then only, did Goddard realise his lost paradise. He had been buoyed up with hopes that if he could but have speech with her he could win his pardon, his right of entry into the bit-over of Eden that she inhabited. Now she had closed the gates. If the porter had been the angel of the flaming sword, Goddard could not have looked at him with more hopeless acquiescence.

He wandered for some time aimlessly through the streets. Life seemed as drear as the murky November afternoon that was merging into a wet, dismal night. He had finished his routine duties for the day, had hurried through them feverishly in view of his visit to Lady Phayre. He walked on to Piccadilly Circus. There he stopped, debated for a moment what he should do. A Bayswater ’bus had just drawn up at the end of the lumbering line, and the conductor was vociferating loudly. He shouted into Goddard’s face—

“Now, then! Nottin’ ’Ill, sir. Room inside.”

Goddard turned away quickly. He could not go home. The thought of Lizzie, foul and drunken, caused a red cloud to pass before his eyes. In his present mood it would be well not to see her.

He made his way to his club, mounted to the quiet library, where he would be undisturbed by the chatter of acquaintances, and pulling up an arm-chair before a fire-place in a dark corner, gave himself up to the grim task of reconstructing his life. A new devastating element had come into his sphere—Lizzie. In the days before his friendship with Lady Phayre his wife had counted for little in his earnest life. He regretted her unhappiness, did what lay in his power to remedy the irremediable mistake of his marriage; but never desiring freedom, the bond scarcely troubled him. Even during the sweetness of his intercourse with Lady Phayre it had galled him but little. She was so far above him, the feelings with which he regarded her were so new to his almost original experience that he had not realised that he loved her after the common way of men. In the serenity of Lady Phayre’s atmosphere Lizzie counted for no more than the little bare top-room in which he had once lived, his early memories of hardship and struggle with poverty. But now when the idyll was over, when he felt the man’s fierce passion for the woman that was lost to him, the other woman who stood between counted as a terrible, resistless force.

He gazed with set features into the fire. It faded, and in its place rose the scene of that night when the two women had met. One face noble, intellectual, pure in outline; the other, sodden, coarse, and bestial. He gripped the arms of his chair, and a half groan came from his lips. A loathing of the woman to whom he was bound arose within him like a nausea.

Then anger shook him—anger at the folly of his marriage; anger at the coarse nature of his wife, at her father’s drunkenness, at the pretty baby face that had caught his raw fancy—anger, too, at Lady Phayre. Why had she sought him out? Why had she lured him on to enslave himself to her? Anger at her scorn of him, at her fine-lady sensitiveness that was revolted at the sight of a drunken shrew. Anger at her having led him into the fool’s paradise only to eject him ignominiously.

A slight tap on his shoulder aroused him. He started round: the anger that was hot within him turned against the disturber. It was Gleam.

“I have been looking round the club for some one to dine with. Come along,” he said in his friendly way.

But Goddard glowered at him. At that moment Gleam seemed to belong to the other side of the great gulf, and he hated him with the old class-hatred. He looked so spick and span with his evening dress, and gold eye-glass, and meticulously trimmed head. His manner was so easy, giving the impression of freedom from sordid cares. He had no foul drunken wife dragging him down. He could meet Lady Phayre on a level. He could offer her marriage, and she could but take the offer as a compliment. A sense of personal degradation filled Goddard’s soul, and he hated himself for hating Gleam. In a moment, however, he came to his senses, but not before Gleam had rallied him on his confusion.

“Caught you napping, eh? Well—will you dine?”

“No,” said Goddard, rising from his chair. “Not to-night. I ought to have got out of this half-an-hour ago.”

He made a pretence of stretching himself as if he had been asleep. Gleam looked at him with his quick glance.

“You have been overworking yourself. Take care. You great strong men break with a crash. Go away and have a rest.”

“Like Lady Phayre,” said Goddard, in the bitterness of his heart.

“Quite so. That confounded strike of yours did for her. What the dickens we’re to do without her I don’t know.”

“Life will go on just the same, I suppose. No one is indispensable.”

He laughed mirthlessly. A faint flush rose in Gleam’s dry cheeks.

“You’re talking treason, Goddard. You certainly do want a rest.”

“One wants a devil of a lot of things one can’t get,” said Goddard.

“I want my dinner, and I’m going to get it,” replied Gleam good-humouredly. “Goodbye.”

He went out of the library, took his place in the lift. His eyes twinkled, and he smoothed his moustache abstractedly. Then a little exclamation broke from him.

“I wonder!” said he.

“Did you speak, sir?” said the lift-porter.

“Eh?” replied Gleam. “Yes; I wonder—I wonder why I have come down to the basement when I wanted the dining-room floor.”

But Goddard could not sit any longer in the library. The brooding spell was over, and its place was taken by feverish unrest. He left the Club, went out into the streets, and began to walk rapidly. Whither was he going? He did not care. A vague idea that he could free himself of his madness by physical exercise prompted him. He had a faint recollection of a scene in a penny dreadful read in his board-school days—a scene where the hero, to bring calmness to his throbbing brain, mounted his horse and galloped at whirlwind speed over miles and miles of moorland, in frenzied chase, until the noble animal’s heart burst and he staggered and fell, throwing his rider, who broke his neck. But Goddard walked—up the hurrying Strand and Fleet Street, through the fast-emptying City; eastwards, up Fenchurch Street, the Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road, jostling through the crowded thoroughfares that reeked with the odour of fried-fish, naphtha from costers’ barrows, and the day’s sweat of the toiling population; down Whitehouse Lane and Stepney High Street on to Ratcliffe Highway. The squalor and misery of it all touched the ever-responsive chord in his nature, awoke the demagogue in him to sympathy with the people. The East End had never appeared to him so terrible, so crushing in its vast unloveliness. Mile after mile it was just the same—the same stench, the same stunted men; the same anemic girl-mothers; the same foul, fringed, and feathered women of the street; the same bestial talk that seemed to hang continuously on the air; the same scenes of drunken brawling outside the public-houses; the same dreamy, endless tram-cars, smoothly gliding past this hubbub and swelter of humanity on the pavement; and everywhere the same joyless struggle for the four sole ends of life—food, raiment, shelter, and forgetfulness.

Goddard felt a strange and stern comfort in steeping his soul in these wide waters of bitterness. He went on and on, through brawling companies of sailors, swarthy Lascars, and the land-scum that clings round the seafaring life; past evil-smelling marine stores, live-stock dealers dissonant with the screeching of parrots, slop-shops, low eating-houses, scented from afar, even through the general stench, by the miasmic exhalations from basement gratings. At the end of the Highway he turned, retraced his steps, went through the foul river-side slums, crossed the Commercial Road, struck northwards, up dark, narrow streets, where the flare and turmoil of the great arteries were perceived but faintly, and the minor privacies of life were in sordid evidence. Through streets of sweaters’ dens he could see the vague forms of the workers behind the blindless windows. Once he stopped and counted—thirty in one small, gas-lit room.

To carry on the combat with the powers of evil that enthralled this hideous city, his life needed little reconstruction. He thought of Lady Phayre, clenched his stick, and swung it furiously.

“I’ll go on with my work, and she can go to the devil!” he said.

And he walked on through the endless streets.

It is a simple way to rid ourselves of burdens, to consign them to Avernus, and ship them on the waters of Lethe. Unfortunately it is not always successful. They are apt to be elusive, like the vampire in the Indian story which Vikram could not keep in his sack. They slip from the hold of the dark ship, and return to the shoulders of the consigner. But in this Goddard’s pride allowed no confession of failure. He blustered himself into the belief that Lady Phayre was no more to him than Hecuba was to the First Player, thus playing the hypocrite to himself with morose and stubborn futility. He plunged into his work with redoubled energy, grew angry when he found that it did not give him the old sufficing happiness, and obstinately refused to allow the simple, obvious cause.

And then the new element of discord in his life had to be accepted and harmonised. Lizzie was going from bad to worse. He brought Emily to live in the house to take permanent charge of her. Together they tried to mitigate the evil, to circumvent her in her plans for obtaining drink; but she was more than their equal in cunning. The disease had laid its everlasting grasp upon her. She sank daily in degradation. Daniel could not cheat himself into the fancy of freedom from this burden of loathing. Yet he was a man with a keen sense of justice. The more his heart revolted, the more doggedly did he repress outward manifestation. He bore her reproaches silently, strove to render her lot less bitter.

“I believe you’re an angel from heaven, Daniel,” said Emily once. She always had looked up to him with reverential adoration. “How you can put up with her I don’t know. You’re a living angel if ever there was one.”

“You think so, do you, Em?” he answered with a rough laugh, rather touched. “Well, go on thinking so. It won’t do me any harm.”

Only once did Lizzie refer to the night of Lady Phayre’s visit. It was a Sunday evening. Emily had gone to church, and had left the two together in the drawing-room. Daniel was smoking a pipe over a book, and Lizzie was engaged with some needlework—a rare occupation. She had been less fretful that day, had even asked him to sit with her. Gradually, as Daniel read, her efforts with her needle became spasmodic. There were intervals of gazing into the fire, and sudden resumptions of industry. Then she rose, moved about the room, idly examining nicknacks and fidgeting with furniture. At last she left the room, and entered her bedroom that adjoined.

Suddenly Daniel’s attention was arrested by a sharp tinkling sound. He started to his feet and went quickly to join Lizzie. It was as he had suspected. By the half-light of the dim-burning gas he saw her thrusting a bottle beneath some garments in a trunk. A glass half full of spirits was close by on the mantelpiece.

“Lizzie! How can you?” he cried.

She turned upon him in a fury.

“How dare you come in here! How dare you spy upon me! If I want to drink I’ll drink. What business is it of yours if I kill myself?”

She seized the glass, had already put it to her lips, when he strode forward and dashed it from her hand.

“You won’t do it to-night anyhow, Lizzie,” he said calmly.

She broke into a torrent of angry speech.

When the drink or passion was upon her, she used the vernacular of the Sunington streets—of her own home, for the matter of that. He waited until there was a lull in the tempest.

“I’ll have the bottle anyway,” he said, turning to the trunk.

But that was the signal for a fresh outburst. She sat upon the trunk, swore he should never have it while she lived, prepared to defend her property by physical means. Goddard shrugged his shoulders, and sat down upon the bed.

“All right,” he said; “I’ll wait.”

Then she burst into hysterical sobbing. She wished she was dead. She hated him. He was a brute. That was all he lived for—to keep the spy upon her when he wasn’t making up to other women.

“Do you think I’m a fool?” she cried, suddenly taking her hands from her face and turning to him. “Do you think I don’t know? I don’t interfere with you: why should you interfere with me? Only don’t bring your women to this house. Do you think I don’t know your goings on? You are worse than I am. I don’t pretend. You are a dirty blackguard. You think I don’t know all about your Rhodanthes and things?”

He started as if she had struck him, for a moment lost the command over himself that he had maintained through all the ordure of words. He regained it with a violent effort, clutching the counterpane fiercely, until his finger-nails were turned back. He understood now how a man could beat a woman. If he lost the hold over himself, he would rush to her and beat her—beat her until she lay senseless. Perhaps she almost expected it, for she paused at the last words, and looked at him half-coweringly, half-defiantly. So their eyes remained fixed on one another in the dim-lit room. Then she shuddered with body and lips, and uttering a low cry hid her face. A terror had taken possession of her. She was conquered.

Daniel rose from the bed, went to her, and took her by the arm.

“Go into the next room,” he said sternly, and she obeyed.

He joined her after he had disposed of the disputed whisky-bottle. And there they sat in an appalling silence, until Emily came back from church, and relieved him of his charge.

That was the last time that Lizzie referred to Lady Phayre. He wondered how she had learned her name—that name Rhodanthe, which he had ever in his mind—which, save this once, he had never heard uttered aloud. It was a curious freak of fate’s irony that, on this one occasion, it should have been uttered by his wife’s lips. The circumstance embittered him still more against her.

A few weeks after this the long-expected vacancy in the Hough division occurred, and Goddard was definitely chosen as the Radical candidate. In the very beginning of his electoral campaign he received news from London that the terrible drink illness had fallen upon his wife.