Page:When It Was Dark.djvu/269

Rh There had been no greater pleasure than to satisfy her wishes, however tasteless, however vulgar. And then, hastening back to her side with a fortune for her (the second he had poured into the white grasping hands), he had found her with the severe young priest. A power which he was unable to understand had risen up as a bar to his enormous egoism. She had gone, utterly disappeared, vanished as a shadow vanishes at the moving of a light.

And all his resources, all those of the theatre people with whom she had been so long associated, had utterly failed to trace her.

The Church had swallowed her up in its mystery and gloom. She was lost to him for ever. And the fierce longing to be with her once more burnt within him like the unhallowed flame upon the altar of an idol. As he regarded the chaos into which the Church was plunged he would laugh to himself in horrid glee. His indifference to all forms of religious congregations had gone. He felt an active and bitter hatred now hardly less than that of Schuabe himself. And all the concentrated hatred and incalculable malice that his poisoned brain distilled was focussed and directed upon the young curate who had been the means and instrument of his discomfiture. He had begun to plan schemes of swift revenge, laughing at himself sometimes for the crude melodrama of his thoughts.

As a waiter with his powdered hair and white silk stockings showed Schuabe into the smoking-room, the Jew saw with surprise the flushed and agitated face of his host, so unlike its usual sensual serenity. He wondered what had arisen to disturb Llwellyn, and he made up his mind that he would know it before the evening was over.

Schuabe, on his part, seemed depressed and in poor