Did he leave any message?"
"No, sir, except that he would write to you from Paris, if he did not
find you at the club."
"That will do, Francis. Don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow."
"No, sir."
The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.
Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the table and passed into the
library. For a quarter of an hour he walked up and down the room,
biting his lip and thinking. Then he took down the Blue Book from one
of the shelves and began to turn over the leaves. "Alan Campbell, 152,
Hertford Street, Mayfair." Yes; that was the man he wanted.
CHAPTER 14
At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of
chocolate on a tray and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite
peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his
cheek. He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.
The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as
he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he
had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not dreamed at all.
His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain.
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
He turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his
chocolate. The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The
sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was
almost like a morning in May.
Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent,
blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there
with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had
suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for
Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came
back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still
sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was!
Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.
He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken
or grow mad. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory
than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride
more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of
joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the
senses. But this was not one of them. It was a thing to be driven out
of the min
|