Our neighbours on the other side of the Channel are blessed with many qualities which were not given to us who reside in these islands, and amongst them is one which most Englishmen would not pay a penny for if it were on sale in market overt. This is the quality of sentiment—a thing which we others strive to choke at its birth, and to which at any time we give but an outside corner of the hearth of life. It is a quality of which one may have too much, but in its place it is an excellent and a desirable quality, for it tends to the establishment of a fitting sense of proportion, and makes people polite and considerate at the right moment. Had the tragedy of Haidee and Darlington occurred in England, there would have been much vulgar curiosity manifested, for amongst us we often fail to gauge the niceties of a situation. In Paris, sentiment fixed the affaire Damerel at its right value in a few hours. It was a veritable tragedy—one to be spoken of with bated breath—one of those terrible dramas of real life which far transcend anything that can be placed upon the stage. The situations were pathetic, the figures of the chief actors of a veritable notability. The young husband, great as a poet and handsome as a Greek god; the young wife, beautiful and charming; the plutocrat lover, of whom death forbade to speak—they were all of a type to attract. Then the intense tragedy of the final situation! Who could tell what had occurred between the lover and the wife in that last supreme scene, since he was dead and she bereft of reason? It had all the elements of greatness, and greatness demands respect. Therefore, instead of being vulgarised, as it would have been in unsentimental England, the affaire Damerel was spoken of with a tender respect and with few words. It was an event too deplorable to merit common discussion.{224}

Lucian had swept through London to Paris intent on killing Darlington with his own hands. His mental balance had been destroyed, and he himself rendered incapable of hearing or seeing reason long before he reached the French capital. The courteous manager who replied to Lucian’s calm inquiries for Mrs. Damerel did not realise that the composure of the distinguished-looking young gentleman was that of the cunning madman. Inside Lucian’s breast nestled a revolver—his fingers were itching to get at it as he followed his guide up the stairs, for he had made up his mind to shoot his faithless wife and his treacherous enemy on sight.

The sight of Haidee, mopping and mowing in her corner, the sound of her awful laughter, brought Lucian back to sanity. Living and moving as if he were in some fearful dream, he gave orders and issued directions. The people of the hotel, half paralysed by the strangeness of the tragedy, wondered at his calmness; the police were astonished by the lucidity of the statement which he gave to them. His one great desire was to shield his wife’s name. The fierce resentment which he had felt during his pursuit of her had completely disappeared in presence of the tragedy. Before the end of the afternoon some curious mental process in him had completely rehabilitated Haidee in his estimation: he believed her to have been deeply wronged, and declared with emphasis that she must have killed Darlington in a fit of desperation following upon some wickedness of his own. Her incriminating letter he swept aside contemptuously—it was a sure proof, he said, that the poor child’s mind was already unhinged when it was written. He turned a blind eye to undoubted facts. Out of a prodigal imagination and an exuberant fancy he quickly built up a theory which presently assumed for him the colours of absolute truth. Haidee had been tempted in secret by this devil who had posed as friend; he had used his insidious arts to corrupt her, and the temptation had fallen upon her at the very moment when he, Lucian,{225} was worrying her with his projects of retrenchment. She had taken flight, the poor Haidee who had lived in rose-leaf luxury all her days, and had fled from her exaggerated fears to the man she believed her friend and Lucian’s. Then, when she had found out his true character, she—in a moment of awful fear or fright, most probably—had killed him. That was the real story, the poor, helpless truth. He put it before Sprats and Saxonstowe with a childlike belief in its plausibility and veracity that made at least one of them like to weep—he had shown them the letter which Haidee had written to Lucian before leaving town, and they knew the real truth of the whole sorry business. It seemed best, after all, thought Sprats, and said so to Saxonstowe when she got the chance, that Lucian should cherish a fiction rather than believe the real truth. And that he did believe his fiction was soon made evident.

‘It is all my fault—all!’ he said to Sprats, with b............