iv
louis fores had been intoxicated into a condition of poesy. he was deliciously incapable of any precise thinking; he could not formulate any theory to account for the startling phenomenon of a roll of bank-notes loose under a chair on a first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house; he could not even estimate the value of the roll—he felt only that it was indefinitely prodigious. but he had the most sensitive appreciation of the exquisite beauty of those pieces of paper. they were not merely beautiful because they stood for delight and indulgence, raising lovely visions of hosiers' and jewellers' shops and the night interiors of clubs and restaurants—raising one clear vision of himself clasping a watch-bracelet on the soft arm of rachel who had so excitingly smiled upon him a moment ago. they were beautiful in themselves; the aspect and very texture of them were beautiful—surpassing pictures and fine scenery. they were the most poetic things in the world. they transfigured the narrow, gaslit first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house into a secret and unearthly grove of bliss. he was drunk with quivering emotion.
and then, as he gazed at the divine characters printed in sable on the rustling whiteness, he was aware of a stab of ugly, coarse pain. up to the instant of beholding those bank-notes he had been convinced that his operations upon the petty-cash book would be entirely successful and that the immediate future of horrocleave's was assured of tranquillity; he had been blandly certain that horrocleave held no horrid suspicion against him, and that even if horrocleave's pate did conceal a dark thought, it would be conjured at once away by the superficial reasonableness of the falsified accounts. but now his mind was terribly and inexplicably changed, and it seemed to him impossible to gull the acute and mighty horrocleave. failure, exposure, disgrace, ruin, seemed inevitable—and also intolerable. it was astonishing that he should have deceived himself into an absurd security. the bank-notes, by some magic virtue which they possessed, had opened his eyes to the truth. and they presented themselves as absolutely indispensable to him. they had sprung from naught, they belonged to nobody, they existed without a creative cause in the material world—and they were indispensable to him! could it be conceived that he should lose his high and brilliant position in the town, that two policemen should hustle him into the black van, that the gates of a prison should clang behind him? it could not be conceived. it was monstrously inconceivable.... the bank-notes ... he saw them wavy, as through a layer of hot air.
a heavy knock on the front door below shook him and the floor and the walls. he heard the hurried feet of rachel, the opening of the door, and julian's harsh, hoarse voice. julian, then, was not quite an hour late, after all. the stir in the lobby seemed to be enormous, and very close to him; mrs. maldon had come forth from the parlour to greet julian on his birthday.... louis stuck the bank-notes into the side pocket of his coat. and as it were automatically his mood underwent a change, violent and complete. "i'll teach the old lady to drop notes all over the place," he said to himself. "i'll just teach her!" and he pictured his triumph as a wise male when, during the course of the feast, his great-aunt should stumble on her loss and yield to senile feminine agitation, and he should remark superiorly, with elaborate calm: "here is your precious money, auntie. a good thing it was i and not burglars who discovered it. let this be a lesson to you!... where was it? it was on the landing carpet, if you please! that's where it was!" and the nice old creature's pathetic relief!
as he went jauntily downstairs there remained nothing of his mood of intoxication except a still thumping heart.
